Originally Posted by
maartena
With regards to the New Jersey datacenter only decision:
They made that decision last year. You don't develop two environment that are geared to hosting 5 servers each, and consolidate them into one location geared to hosting 10 servers. They claimed they had hardware in Amsterdam, and they probably did have leased hardware.... but you don't just decide a week, or even 2 weeks before the anticipated move date on Jan 11 that they decided to "start" with New Jersey.
I believe the reason the move got pushed back, and pushed back again.... was indeed because that decision had been made MONTHS ago, and they now needed to increase the capacity to be able to host all the hardware for 10 game servers as opposed to just 5. (And, obviously, Bullroarer, Palentir, and other internal test servers). DOUBLING the amount of capacity needed for servers requires planning. You need double the amount of switch ports, double the amount of bandwidth, double the amount of IP addresses, double the amount of rack space, CPU's, storage space, double everything to be able to host all 10 game servers.
They had to have started planning for this in October or earlier, and probably still had hoped to finish before Christmas, which obviously did not happen. This was not a sudden change of heart, this was a well calculated decision that was made probably in Q3 of 2015, and had to be planned and thought out, designed, and implemented.
I'm not personally affected by the EU servers moving or not moving, but Turbine should not claim that this was a "sudden" change "because it works better" in New Jersey. You don't just move 10 servers worth in an environment that was designed for 5 US servers, even if they would want to to cut costs or something, they needed to have the capacity ready and built weeks in advance to do this.