It's About Time: Australians Finally Get Locally Hosted World of Warcraft Servers

[Steven Bogos]

It's About Time: Australians Finally Get Locally Hosted World of Warcraft Servers

After 10 years, Australians will finally have locally hosted World of Warcraft servers.

It's been a long, long time coming, but Australian World of Warcraft players will soon finally be able to play the game the way it's meant to be played: free of lag. Tonight at a World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor pre-launch community event in Sydney, Blizzard announced that the current Oceanic realms (which are actually hosted in California at the moment) will be migrated to servers based in Australia.

The move to local hosting should significantly reduce lag for players in Australia and New Zealand. Just as an FYI, a "good" ping for Australians on the current Oceanic servers is around 150ms, with most people hovering between 150-300. The changeover will occur as a part of next week's scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, October 28, local time. The Oceanic servers will be down for an extended window. When the servers come back online, they will be hosted in Australia.

As an added bonus, Australian World of Warcraft players who are currently playing on US realms will be offered a free character transfer to any of the Oceanic realms for a limited time.

Earlier in the year, we heard that Diablo III received has local Australian servers [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/133042-Diablo-III-Gets-Australian-Servers-Update]. But until now, WoW players had been left behind.

It's good to see Blizzard finally giving us what we've only been asking for for 10 years, and now, maybe Australians will actually be able to compete with Americans in high-level PVP and raids, since we will no longer have that massive lag disadvantage.

Source: Games.on.net [http://games.on.net/2014/10/world-of-warcraft-australian-servers/]

Permalink

 

[VanQ]

One part of me is saying: Hell, it's about time.

The other part of me is saying : Well bugger. I'm all settled in with a top Mythic guild on US-Thrall.

I don't want to have to transfer 11 90s across to a new server. And I don't want to leave my guild. I wonder if Mythic raids will be cross server?

 

[JayRPG]

I never thought this would happen in a million years. Not that I would have made the switch if I still playing WoW anyway.

I only played on US servers (from Australia) and raided in a world top 250, and several world top 500 guilds and never really had a problem keeping up with the encounter mechanics and DPS.

Oceanic servers (in my experience) are filled with so many obnoxious twats, the few I tried were about 65% 12 year old trolls, I never had that kind of experience on US servers so that is where I stayed from the end of Vanilla to Cataclysm/firelands; though it probably matters a lot less now with cross-server everything.

 

[briankoontz]

One part of me is saying: Hell, it's about time.

The other part of me is saying : Well bugger. I'm all settled in with a top Mythic guild on US-Thrall.

I don't want to have to transfer 11 90s across to a new server. And I don't want to leave my guild. I wonder if Mythic raids will be cross server?

They said many months ago that they would not be, the ostensible reason being to allow intra-realm competition for realm 1sts and to make the overall speed race raid kills meaningful. I think these reasons are really lame and they should just open it up. Given that *right now* Mythics are cross-realm and players are happy with it maybe they'll take notice.

 

[Shinkicker444]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/14996569538

^^^ The FAQ on the Oceanic Realms general forum. They say you can do cross-realm stuff with Friends still. As for Realm firsts, wouldn't it be tied to whichever server has the most players representing? Besides World Firsts are such a small population they shouldn't limit it to just them.

 

[jackpipsam]

It's about time!
I am so happy they're finally doing this!

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Since a lot of MMOs (mostly f2p small ones) have servers better aimed at Australians, and now Blizzard is joining the ranks, I wonder if this means EA will consider bringing back the Asia/Pacific servers for The Old Republic.

 

[Nergui]

Too little, too late.

 

[ron1n]

I still don't understand the point of this.

I mean, any hardcore Australian players will have long since settled down on US servers alongside (often) american or international guilds. So they're unlikely to leave. And even for everyone else, why risk transferring to a server that may very well be dead pop wise soon after the expansion honeymoon period ends?

Like, aside from the SEA playerbase, is there even THAT many people still playing it that regularly?


In future, MMO developers need to either commit to Oceanic hosted servers from day one or not at all. Just lacks impact and gets too messy when implemented this late in a games life cycle.

EDIT: plus also should note that with the whole groupfinder aspect of running instances, seems like it might get messy in terms of where the instance is hosted...

Oh well, better late than never I guess.

 

[Svarr]

Too little, too late.

^This is my thought as well.

Blizzard: "we need more money to make up for the people jumping the boat, i SUPPOSE we can put a server in Australia, let's make it appear like it was with good intentions too if we can."

 

[EbonBehelit]

Don't get me wrong, this is still a VERY nice change, but the disadvantage OCE teams have against US teams in pvp isn't going away, since OCE vs US matches are still going to be hosted on US servers.

 

[Ferisar]

Too little, too late.

^This is my thought as well.

Blizzard: "we need more money to make up for the people jumping the boat, i SUPPOSE we can put a server in Australia, let's make it appear like it was with good intentions too if we can."

-Pats on head-

OT:
Good. This has been requested for a while and quite a bit further than just WoW. The trend needs to be set so people from there can actually play without having to connect to U.S. and experience the glory of 300+ping.

 

[NickBrahz]

If this was 5-10 years ago, people would care, i notice it also says a character transfer not characters.

 

[FrozenCones]

I can finally fulfil my dream of doing 40man Thaddius without being removed from the raid for terrible latency.

Oh wait.

In all honesty, ive become accustomed to playing with a ~200+ ping. It is a nice addition and one that is making me seriously consider raiding again.

 

[Flammablezeus]

Tell me eight years ago when I might have cared.

While having Australian servers is a good thing, waiting this long was a completely boneheaded move. People now have to choose between playing with people they've been playing with for years, and playing the game on an even playing field with everybody else. This will fragment the playerbase now.

Blizzard won't be able to go back on this without causing even more people to leave the game. I also have a feeling that they actually will go back on it, after seeing several other games cut their Australian servers. This usually just pisses off Australian players who will often move on to other games (like I did with ToR and Loadout, although to be fair ToR was already simply WoW-Lite so that wouldn't have held my attention long anyway.)

The lesson to be learnt here is that devs really need Australian servers from day one if they want us to play their game and not be completely alienated. This alienation becomes especially evident in games with things like dodge mechanics like DCUO and GW2.In these games, even if you dodge as soon as an enemy begins their attack you get hit. All because we don't have local servers.

 

[RicoADF]

Glad you pointed out that Australians having ping issues is more to do with distance than net speed, sick of people saying our net is bad because of high pings when they don't realise it's the fact the server's located on the other side of the planet that's causing the issue.

 

[VanQ]

Tell me eight years ago when I might have cared.

While having Australian servers is a good thing, waiting this long was a completely boneheaded move. People now have to choose between playing with people they've been playing with for years, and playing the game on an even playing field with everybody else. This will fragment the playerbase now.

Blizzard won't be able to go back on this without causing even more people to leave the game. I also have a feeling that they actually will go back on it, after seeing several other games cut their Australian servers. This usually just pisses off Australian players who will often move on to other games (like I did with ToR and Loadout, although to be fair ToR was already simply WoW-Lite so that wouldn't have held my attention long anyway.)

The lesson to be learnt here is that devs really need Australian servers from day one if they want us to play their game and not be completely alienated. This alienation becomes especially evident in games with things like dodge mechanics like DCUO and GW2.In these games, even if you dodge as soon as an enemy begins their attack you get hit. All because we don't have local servers.

Final Fantasy 14 also had the same issues with dodging mechanics but due to latency you'd take the hit anyway. Made the game completely unplayable for me and gave me no hope of ever enjoying end game content. I liked the game but they lost my subscription because of it. Funnily enough, I can raid on the highest difficulty in WoW and if I dodge a mechanic it works properly, even on a 250 ping.

So yeah, WoW beats them all even without local servers. And Blizz should get a pat on the back for that at least.

 

[Starbolt-81]

I have been playing on Dragonblight US since vanilla, along with my Australian/New Zealand guild, and I can honestly say that my 280ms ping has hardly ever been a problem in PvE content for any of us.

Its nice that they finally got around to doing this but really, its too little too late for many Australians that have had a fair number of years playing on the U.S servers, and who probably have more than one character established. My guild has already begun talking about whether this is worth bothering about, and the general consensus is that unless Blizzard offers some kind of full guild transfer we probably wont worry about it.

 

[Aaron Sylvester]

So Blizz let WoW peak to 12 million subscribers in Oct 2010, let the best expansions pass (TBC and WotLK) while still missing Oceanic servers...and NOW they finally do it 4-5 years later?

Oh well.