Best RedM server in Australia and OCE

RedM is server authoritative. Your client does not decide whether your shot landed; it asks, and waits. Every shot, every horse turn, every door and every timed interaction costs one round trip. That is why latency is not a background detail in RedM the way it is in a turn based game.

Typical round trip times from an Australian east coast connection:

Those are round trip figures over consumer connections and will vary by ten or twenty milliseconds with your ISP and the route. The gap between them is large enough that the variation does not change the conclusion.

How to check before you commit. Ask in the server's Discord where the machine is hosted, by city and not just by country. "Australia" sometimes means a Sydney data centre and sometimes means a Los Angeles box with an Australian owner. If they publish an IP, a plain ping from your own machine settles it in ten seconds and is worth more than any claim on a listing page.

New Zealand players: almost nothing is hosted in New Zealand, because the population does not justify the hardware. Auckland to Sydney is typically 25 to 45 ms, so an Australian east coast server is effectively the Oceanic option for you too.

Most RedM servers run one of two open frameworks, VORP or RSGCore, or a fork of one. Both are real projects maintained by people giving their time away, and there is nothing wrong with either. But it is worth understanding what it means for the server you join.

A framework decides what is possible. If two servers run stock VORP with the same popular script packs, they will play similarly no matter how different their websites look. The inventory behaves the same way, the jobs are the same jobs, and the economy has the same shape. That is why so many RedM servers feel interchangeable after a week.

A server that has written its own framework is making a bet: more work, more bugs early on, but systems that fit together because they were designed together rather than assembled. Neither choice is correct. What you should do is ask, because the answer tells you what the next six months on that server will feel like.

Questions that get a useful answer:

• Is this VORP, RSGCore, a fork, or something written here?
• Which of the major systems were written for this server rather than bought or downloaded?
• When something breaks, can you fix it yourselves, or do you wait for an upstream release?

An open server can be joined by anyone who finds it. An allowlisted server reads an application first. Neither is the correct answer, and working out which one you are looking at is more useful than deciding in advance which you prefer.

An allowlist buys a filter at the door. The failure mode it is aimed at is not an empty server but a full one, where a stranger rides into a scene you have spent an hour building and shoots everyone for something to do. It costs you the wait, and it costs the server a smaller pool of people, which is felt hardest at 11pm on a Tuesday.

An open door buys the opposite. You can play tonight, and a server that anybody can walk into keeps meeting new people rather than the same forty. The cost is that nothing is filtered before it arrives, so everything rests on what happens afterwards.

What to look for depends which you are dealing with. On an allowlisted server: an application a person actually reads, a stated turnaround, and rules published before you apply rather than after. A form that approves you instantly is an open server wearing a costume. On an open server: rules published where you can read them before connecting, staff reachable in your evening, and a report that gets dealt with the same night. An open server with real moderation is better than an allowlisted one with none, and the reverse is also true.

This is the thing that decides whether a server is still interesting in month three, and almost nobody asks about it.

The common failure is an economy where money only ever enters and never leaves. Jobs pay from nowhere, shops have infinite stock at fixed prices, and nothing consumes currency permanently. Six weeks in, everyone has everything, prices mean nothing, and the only remaining content is other people.

Signs an economy has actually been thought about:

• Finite shop stock. If the general store has infinite tins of beans, no player will ever buy beans from another player, and player trade is dead before it starts.
• Money leaving the system. Repairs, fees, taxes, spoilage, losing your cargo. Something has to burn currency or it only accumulates.
• Location mattering. If a bank balance is one number available everywhere, distance costs nothing and the map is decoration.
• Production chains with people in them. Ore to ingot to part to weapon is only interesting if different players can occupy different steps.

Ask a server's staff how money leaves their economy. If the answer is vague, you have learned something useful.

A server with two hundred players whose peak is 8pm Eastern is empty at the times most Australians play. Peak hours matter more than totals, and so does whether staff are reachable in your evening rather than yours being their 4am.

Look at the Discord rather than the website. Are people talking at 7pm AEST on a Wednesday? Do staff answer questions in that window, or does everything get resolved while you are asleep? A quiet server with thirty people who are all online when you are beats a large one you only ever see the aftermath of.

Nine questions. Ask them in any server's Discord before you invest a month in a character. Good staff will answer all nine without getting defensive, and that reaction is itself part of the answer.

1. Which city is the machine in?
2. What ping do Australian players actually report?
3. Is this VORP, RSGCore, or something written for this server?
4. Is entry open or allowlisted, and if it is allowlisted, who reads the applications?
5. How does money leave the economy?
6. Does shop stock run out?
7. What are peak hours in AEST?
8. Is anything sold for real money that affects gameplay?
9. What happened the last time a rule was broken by someone popular?

This guide is published by The Pub, so treat the following as what it is: our own answers to our own questions. They are all checkable, and where we come off badly it is said plainly.

Where we come off badly

• We are small and new. If you want a large established population tonight, this is not that server, and a North American one will give you more people despite the ping.
• You cannot join today. Closed testing is running and the allowlist is on until it finishes. If you want to be playing in the next five minutes, that is a genuine mark against us right now.
• An open door does not filter anybody. We have chosen to be open rather than to read applications, which means the work of keeping the server worth playing on happens after somebody arrives rather than before. If you specifically want the quiet of a server that vets people at the door, we are not it.
• A from-scratch framework has more bugs early. That is the honest cost of not running the same stack as everyone else, and we are still in the part where it shows.
• The grind is real. Thirty four skills that all start at nothing, an economy where a new character has five dollars, and a hundred and sixty hours of running to the top of Running. That suits people who like earning things. If you want to be handed a rifle and a horse and get straight to a scene, you will find it slow.

If the checklist above points you somewhere else, go there. A server that suits you is worth more than one that ranked well for a phrase you typed into Google.

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