If you’ve tried to play Star Wars: Squadrons from Australia, chances are your multiplayer experience might have been a little … sub-par. And you’re not alone.
Aussies have been levelling a ton of complaints about the game’s supposedly poor hit detection for weeks to no avail. Users have been posting clips over the last week to the official EA forums and Squadrons sub-reddit, showing instances of enemy pilots happily flying away despite copping literally half a fleet’s worth of lasers right up their exhaust pipes.
Here’s one instance of an Australian blasting the snot out of a TIE Fighter, complete with the visual recognition of hull damage, only to eventually get blown out of the sky.
Aussies, consider holding off on this game. This is about 3/4’s of my online matches from r/StarWarsSquadrons
Another Aussie posted this clip of absolutely smashing the shit out of an X-Wing. Did it do anything? Well, no.
This third clip — you know the drill by now — was equally depressing. SpiderMadJedi21, apparently, has the world’s best X-Wing armour. Either that or something in Squadrons is seriously broken.
Understandably, players are a bit pissed. “Instead of waiting for a minute or 2 to connect to local players, this game just instantly connects to the other side of the world in less than 5 seconds,” one Reddit user complained. “I’d rather wait 5 [minutes] and have an actual PLAYABLE game. Rather than instantly and continuously connect to some bloke’s PS4 on the other side of the world.”
Others questioned whether the issue was down to a lack of local servers, although an EA representative posted in one thread how local servers didn’t “seem to be the issue”.
Still, whatever the issue is, it’s not hard to see why an experience like this is annoying at best, and borderline unplayable at worst:
This is what happens when you don’t have region-specific servers. This is the standard experience for many Aussie/Kiwi players. from r/StarWarsSquadrons
Questions around Squadrons‘ matchmaking and server situation have largely gone unanswered, although EA hasn’t been clear about how extensive the server infrastructure is. There’s a thread 6 pages long on the official Squadrons forums of users complaining about poor hit registration.
Australians have posted in the thread as well, asking if an option could be implemented that would allow you to choose your own server location. It would result in longer matchmaking queues — given the local player count — but it’d ensure higher quality matches, which is why Australians barrack developers to support local dedicated servers whenever possible.
The problem isn’t isolated to down under, either. Players outside of the major regions — South Africa, for instance — are suffering similar jitteriness and lag when thrust into a lobby full of Americans.
So far, the only reply from an EA Community Manager acknowledging the issue Aussies are having has been this:
It’s an issue we’re tracking. Too soon to say anything more, but our engineers are looking into it.
That post was six days ago at the time of writing. The only other official acknowledgement since then has been this line item to the “Online” section of known Star Wars: Squadrons issues:
- We are investigating connectivity reports from players in the Australia and New Zealand region.
The devs know about it, at least, although that message doesn’t seem to have gotten through to a lot of disaffected Aussie pilots. Fingers crossed a solution isn’t too many jumps away. Fortunately, at least the singleplayer mode is still brilliant.
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