How to pick a server region (it is not where you live)

The most common latency complaint we see has the same root cause: the admin picked the region nearest to themselves, and the admin is not where most of the players are.

Optimise for the median, not the mean

If 70% of your community is in central Europe and 30% is on the US east coast, Frankfurt is right — even though it makes a third of your players unhappy. Splitting the difference in Iceland makes everyone unhappy.

The exception is competitive PvP, where consistency matters more than the average. There, picking a region where the spread of pings is tight beats picking one where the mean is lowest but half the server is at 30 ms and half is at 130 ms.

Distance is a floor, not a prediction

Light in fibre gives you roughly 1 ms per 100 km, and real routes are never straight. A player 500 km away will not get 5 ms — 15 to 25 ms is realistic once you account for routing, the last mile and their own Wi-Fi.

What this means practically: the difference between two datacentres 300 km apart is usually noise. The difference between continents is not.

Test before you commit

Run a traceroute from a few of your regulars to candidate regions before you decide. Look for:

• Consistent latency, not just low latency — jitter is what players actually feel
• No transatlantic detour on what should be a domestic route
• Sane hop counts; a route with 22 hops has more places to go wrong

Getting it wrong is cheap

If you pick wrong, region migration is free once per billing period and takes about half an hour. Your world, mods, configs and schedules all move with you. It is not worth agonising over the choice up front — pick the obvious one and move if the data says otherwise.