I know the thread title is about AUS/NZ but I want to shed some light on what is happening in the Americas since Latin America is the other region that was ripped out and isolated. As everyone knows (because I am constantly beating a dead horse in various threads about this) I am a US citizen with permanent residence in Argentina. Up until now I have been racing with my USA account. My connection was always stable and decent but with a reasonably high latency given that I am in Patagonia. I always had the #3 yellow bar, with occasional visits to green #4 and orange #2. I asked multiple times in the FIA lobbies for people to check my ping (the in-game network test never works for me) and the few that did said I looked OK.
Last night I opened an Argentine account and did six times Race A. All six lobbies were full but as I feared there was a huge spread in DR (which has been happening anyway before in the Americas) but now there is also a huge SR spread, just as I feared. I was a permanent green #4 so no huge improvement there but the gameplay was indeed noticeably smoother. Also, despite the lobbies being headed by three or four faster guys (including me) the rest were low DR, low SR players. Despite me fearing a crashfest, the racing was quite clean and smooth. Only once was I taken out at the first corner of Maggiore. Had some good close racing at the front with Argentines & Brazilians.
Assuming PD uses AWS infrastructure (based on the fact that they use Amazon S3 for storage) my WiFi pings from my computer to all AWS regions can be seen below (keep in mind that the PS4 is wired to the modem so ping will be lower there):
Assuming the Americas server was in Virgina and has been moved (according to a suspicion by
@HellzFire ) it is probably now in Ohio. That's a bit more latency for me than before at 277ms. The Latin American server is definitely in Sao Paulo and I ping that at 100ms. So, overall a latency improvement.
However, here is where PDs reasoning falls apart. If this were only for FIA races I would understand. There's a big enough playerbase to have good races. But for the Dailies really nothing has changed overall latency-wise but grid counts and DR/SR spreads are very bad now.
USA and Canada still have South Americans, Middle Easterners and Asians playing on US accounts and that makes for some horrendous latency coming from people in the Middle and Far East. Sure, some of the South Americans aren't there anymore but people living halfway around the world using USA accounts are still there.
In the new Latin America server that problem doesn't exist since there is no benefit to anyone halfway around the world holding a Brazilian or Argentine account (games are much more expensive on Latin American PSN accounts and there are no digital codes allowed in most of the LA PS Stores). However, Chileans are still getting yellow bars. Mexicans and Central Americans have gone from green bars to yellow and orange. Mexico is a lot closer to Ohio than Sao Paulo. In Latin America really the only people benefitting are southern Brazil, central Argentina & Uruguay. For the rest of Latin America latency is either the same or worse than before.
So I feel that, in effect, all this is doing is lowering the playerbase in the Americas without an overall improvement. Sure, it will be better for some, but it is also worse for others.
I'm not even sure anymore what point I am trying to make. Just some observations.
And I really feel for AUS/NZ. It must be lonely over there now...
