They know a lot of US people are playing, so why didn't they make an NA block?

[BahnKnakyu]

80% Japanese
8% Chinese (Ship 3(China<Simplified Chinese>) Ship 5+Ship 7(Taiwan/HK<Traditional Chinese)
2% English (Ship 2, only 2~3 block)

Where are these numbers from?

Now, with that being said, what Sega has done with PSO2 is simply short of phenomenal. PSO2 is an action based game that takes in account player positioning, mob positioning even land based destructible positioning, dodging mechanics and very fast combat speeds, yet doesn't seem to suffer from an ounce of latency. The Kin, on his 1.5 meg connection, connecting to servers in Japan from KENTUCKY has 0 lag. Occasionally there are lag spikes, but it has always been overpopulation and not once The Kin's ISP or so.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the combat is CLIENT side. That's why it looks smooth, because the client handles a lot of the monster positions and actions. I think all the server really does is handle the numbers and/or where a mob is *sort of* is. If you look around you while you're playing, you may occasionally see players swinging at thin air and mobs instant-teleporting to "resync" themselves back into position (this often causes drops to appear several yards away from where the mob was killed).

The desync is not as bad as it was in PSU/PSP2:i though. Mobs generally stay in a given point which allows players to wail on a mob at roughly the same time, but it's not perfect.

But no, in short, depending on the server equipment and style of game, latency can be a huge factor in a game. The more graphically intense and physics the server has to keep up with, the more latency comes into play and lag becomes an issue. Apparently, SEGA has some damn good servers on their side to handle connections like they do. They done a bang up job.

If a lot of the calculations and movement are done client side, which I'm pretty sure is. I REALLY doubt that the server keeps track of a particular player and mob's X, Y, and Z coordinates - rather they just keep track of what the player sent (Did the player jump? Did he attack? How much damage did he do? Etc.)

I give Sega credit for improving the netcode from PSU/PSP2i, but I don't think they ran miracles with it. Cleaned it up and made it better, yes, but that's pretty much it.

[ForgottenReality]

Most if not all the English speaking community sticks to Shop 2: Blocks 21-22 and Ship 10: Block 20. We've almost taken it upon ourselves to make those the NA blocks.

[CastSoldierFan96]

They're not going to do this if they can't answer English technical support emails as was shown a few weeks ago. We can't expect them to give special care to us when this is a Japanese game

Bahn is right, a lot of stuff is client side... including if you're getting hit by an enemy or not