Originally Posted by Oscarvil
Australian WoW servers aren't going to happen. There is no incentive for Blizzard to install them. They have plenty of customers paying them for the service they provide (WoW +200ms ping) and are happy about it, by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be customers.
WAR on the other hand is a new MMO trying to get into the market, so it makes sense that they use some of their resources set up a data centre in the southern hemisphere to attract a larger share of the potential customers by the virtue of having better latency.
And as everyone knows, nothing, not even WAR is going to 'kill' WoW so even if WoW loses some customers to WAR it still won't be incentive enough for Blizzard to open a data centre in Australia. Especially not for a game this far into it's life cycle.
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I don't know, it's not just the latency, but the downtime and lag during peak play time. You only have to be on your guild's vent or in general chat for a raid zone to hear the level of frustration Oceanic players have with the current situation.
Will WAR kill WoW? No, of course not. But at least for Oceanic players, I think Blizzard has worn down their reputation a bit, and people will be more likely to try out WAR than they otherwise would be. I also think it'll give WAR the edge it needs to get a foothold. I fully expect WAR to not be as polished as WoW currently is on release, but I think lots of people will say "Well, it's not as good as WoW yet, but at least it doesn't have high latency and lag/downtime in my peak time, I'll give it time".
Will this be enough to convince Blizzard to install real Oceanic servers? Who knows, but I do think it's created a real opening for WAR in this market. I know I will certainly try it, where as before I was on the fence and probably wouldn't have unless it got amazing reviews. I'm not alone in this, others I've talked to have said the same thing. It's of course up to the WAR devs to produce a good enough game to hold onto us Oceanics craving a local server.