We need a way to tell (at least roughly) what our connection strength will be before we join a friend's party. A little icon next to our friends under the friends tab just like the one we have in the upper right of our HUD would do nicely.

Adding European servers is really really great. Please don't confuse this with a complaint. I love that Euro-servers have been added. Its just that now I feel the pain of all those from Europe whom I have played with in the past before the update. My internet gaming background is mostly FPS games. In most of these games you scroll through a server list and can even arrange and filter that list by latency so as to pick a suitable server to play on. Spiral Knights is more forgiving then FPS games in terms of acceptable latency and frame rates, but it is still very important in SK.

The first night of the European server update, I joined a friend who was on a FSC run. Immediately I noticed that I was having crazy lag. I would find my self appearing to teleport long distances across the screen (not a fun thing to have happen when surrounded by shadow-fire) and that for the first time ever my network bar was not at full green bars, but reduced to a pair of orange bars. Then I checked with my friend who was the party leader and sure enough, he was playing from Europe (& enjoying the best FSC run ever for him). I slogged through the map and bid my friends farewell at the beginning of the next map hoping to escape the lag-fest by going solo. This however did not work. My connection bar was unchanged. I was still connected to a European server (from eastcoast U.S.). It was a bit more playable, because I kept it solo while before I was in a party of 4. However, the lag was still very unpleasant.

In addition to Friend Latency Icons it would be really great if going solo switched you back to whatever your normal server preference is (by region or IP, whatever).

Thanks,
-Dracuva