So far it hasn't been a big issue, but I'm just going to nip this in the bud before it becomes an issue. We don't want to have people spamming messages begging for keys any more than the subreddit or the official forums do, unfortunately there are just too many people that want keys and don't have them. I don't want to prevent people from acquiring extra keys that someone is willing to give though, as IMC has already approved this for non-commercial gain (NO PROFITING!).

In order to deal with this, I'm confining all requests for keys or offering of keys to a specific discussion thread titled "Key Exchange Program". On the off chance that someone has a key to give, you must go here for it and keep your key begging off of the rest of this forum. Failure to do so will result in deletion of the post and an immediate ban. If anyone is trying to SELL keys or otherwise profit from them, you will be banned. Thanks for your cooperation in keeping this a spam-free community!

The results of the poll are in and at 7:40 PST the votes are

30-Laima

26-Gabija

http://strawpoll.me/5836890/r

These numbers represent only a little more than half our group so i am not sure whether or not to use them as we did not have a very large sample size. The fact of the matter is Laima still came ahead and we will be sticking to that. Sorry to those that wanted to go to Gabija but you can be sure that we will be fully prepared when the official NA servers are released when the game launches.
Let's have a good one

Hi guys ive recently made a reddit post promoting our group and i would really appreciate it if you guys could upvote for visibility. So far we've only showed up in a few comment threads so this is our first time truly getting our name out there. Let's do this right!

https://www.reddit.com/r/treeofsavior/comments/3qd9cd/join_the_tree_of_savior_steam_group/

While Gabija on the subreddit is leading the poll, we initially chose Laima and when we started posting Laima was well ahead in the reddit poll as well. That being said any server we go to will have a lot of players on. ToSBASE and the subreddit recently decided on Gabija. Do we want to play on Gabija or stick with Laima? Take into account how lag might play a part of this as well.

That being said here's a poll a member started, cast your votes. If we don't get too much more votes we'll be sticking with Laima.

Although nothing is preventing you from leveling a character on either server, we have a month to test I promise you'll want to try out more than one build.

Vote here:

http://strawpoll.me/5836890

Ok this announcement may be lengthy, but I want to cover a lot of ground and I want it to be visible. There has been a lot of speculation, rumors, assumptions, and misinformation regarding the servers on both ToS forums and reddit. What I hope to achieve with this announcement is to enable you all to look at the source info first hand, give a little background info on interpreting this info, and let you decide for yourself instead of relying on 2nd hand or 100th hand info from people that are quick to jump to conclusions and generally don't know what they're talking about.

1. The first step in this journey is to find the IP of the servers. The applcation has to know what server to call, so this info is stored in an xml on your harddrive.
   
   Here is the location of the file from whatever directory you have steam installed to:
   \SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\TreeOfSavior\release\serverlist_recent.xml
   
   In it you'll see this info:
   
   • NAME="Laima" Server0_IP="54.88.25.242" Server0_Port="2000" Server1_IP="52.1.232.91" Server1_Port="2001"
     
   • NAME="Zemyna" Server0_IP="52.2.37.158" Server0_Port="2000" Server1_IP="52.2.8.230" Server1_Port="2001"
     
   • NAME="Gabija" Server0_IP="52.20.66.199" Server0_Port="2000" Server1_IP="52.21.141.72" Server1_Port="2001"
   
   
2. IPlocation is a website that aggregates a few IP query services, here's the URL: https://www.iplocation.net/
   
   You can submit one of the above IP's and it will query using the services listed below, but not all of them return the same result, why? To fully answer that question you'll need to do your own research as it can get quite in depth and technical. Basically though some methods are more clever than others, some rely on information from the database where the IP is registered, some can't tell the difference between the geolocation of the real source and some relay system like a VPN.
   
   Most of them say Ashland, VA, so people on the forums think all the servers are there, but this could just be because of how Amazon Web Services (the server service IMC is using) registers their IP's and may not be the true geolocation. Also, because IMC staff member STAFF_Shawn said on the forums "All servers are in US" people think this confirms that all are in Virginia, but maybe they are in different parts of the US or maybe Shawn didn't have all the facts as it's likely not every staff member knows the technical details.
   
   If you look at the service DB-IP from that link, it says that Laima IP's are in New York, NY, Zemyna IP's are in Seattle, WA, and Gabija in Paris, France. Are they just a crappy service getting all of them wrong? No they seem to get my IP right, and in fact they seem to be more up to date than a lot of those services and they claim to use more sophisticated methods. So maybe they are wrong, but I have a hunch that these are the true results and it makes more sense from a networking perspect to spread things out. If they are going through AWS and they have the ability to choose many different server locations why would they put all 3 in Virginia? It makes no intuitive sense to me.
   
   
3. Given the above information I think we should stick with Laima, because no matter which scenario is the right one, it will most likely be the east coast server and that's the most central location to everyone on this beta. Also, I don't want the group to keep changing servers and confusing everyone. If we are going to change servers, it is preferable it only happens once and with plenty of data and votes to backup why we should and to show that the majority of people are on board with the change. We'll have a lot more definite information if we wait just a few days until launch where people can test things like ping out and there will probably be a more official statement on ToS homepage than a short comment by Shawn on the forums.
   
   
4. Given the IP addresses you can use commands like tracert [IP address] and ping [IP address] in Windows command line to analyze latency between you and the server, you probably won't get useful information until the server opens up though because right now it will just drop your packets since the server isn't available.

I hope this information was helpful to at least some of you and I hope that it clears up why people are saying different things about the server location. Hopefully, you understand now why we chose Laima and I hope that you're better equipped for determining what server is best for you if we end up having to vote on a server change. Thanks for taking the time to read all of this and let me know if there are any questions!