After months of complaints about the state of the SEA Dota 2 servers, E-Club have released a statement regarding the state of the servers, specifically pointing out that they do not actually host the servers. Instead, the server troubles are due to infrastructure differences as well as telecommunication corporation competition.
In the statement, E-Club state that they do not run the Dota 2 servers in South East Asia, and are instead the intermediaries helping out people with connection issues. They also point out that the nature of the dispersed player base and multiple nationalities involved complicates the issue of having stable servers and routing across a geographically complex region.
The entire statement is quoted below:
In 2011, when Dota 2 beta was in progress, we registered ourselves as a basic member in the Dota 2 development forum to help gamers who are facing connection problems and act as a messenger to the respective telecommunication companies.
Unfortunately, people started to misunderstand our intentions and started accusing us for being incompetent in hosting the servers.
E-Club does not run the Dota 2 servers.
In Asia Pacific, the telecommunication in each country has their own pace on deregulation which leads to price and network quality differentials. The infrastructure is not seamless because there isn’t one Telco that covers all parts of Asia. The language and culture are different too which pose a great challenge on countries interconnectivity. For example, ISP A and ISP B are fierce competitors and they prefer not to interconnect to an intermediate home ground despite having the infrastructure to do so. They may route it somewhere else and this leads to a latency increase on the end-user.
The Internet does not operate in direct paths. A server might be physically close to you, but it could actually be routed to another part of the country and back to the server, resulting in a much longer connection. The server with the shortest "network distance" should end up being your best, and while it is the ideal scenario, it does not happen all the time.
Asia’s telecommunication network infrastructure build up is also slow because of geographical challenges. For example, Indonesia and Philippines have many islands and building the infrastructure to connect gamers is very expensive.
Latest development: Valve is aware of the situation and is currently trying their best to improve their services. There is some governmental paperwork required to host servers in some South East Asian countries which we are unable to comply with and therefore, Valve is currently building a second peering port in Singapore to help the people who are affected.
Please bear with us, it is not a one day job.
Source: E-Club's reddit post
