Hopefully you don't feel this is irrelevant enough to beat me with the ban stick

I live in Australia and I, like the rest of the country, am forced to play wow on servers located in America. This results in quite a latency hit that affects nearly every aspect of gameplay. Example: I hear people saying "My latency is over 200ms WTF Blizz??" Last night I logged on and for the first five minutes my latency was 220ms and I nearly wept with joy, I'm used to playing with 400-500ms and I don't usually kick up a fuss. Recently due to problems with my ISP It has been more like 600-900 but that isn't a problem that warrants discussion here.

I hear rumors around that Blizzard were planning to have server(s) located in Australia but when they found out the cost they realised there was no way they would make any money from it. This is because of the state of Australia's Telecom infrastructure and the monopoly that our main provider (Telstra) has, without writing an essay about it we have problems that are part Telstra's fault, part Government's fault and part no one's fault. The end result is that they charge whatever they want whenever they can (occaisonally getting smacked by the ACCC for doing so but not that they care). So do you think we deserve servers physically located in Australia? Am I just having a whinge and I need to STFU? Be nice

If it was economically feasible for Blizzard to place servers in Australia I'm sure they would. Considering it an issue of whether you deserve it or not is silly.

I don't really see the point in them advertising "Oceanic" servers if there's absolutely no difference between the them and "US" servers for the people who would use them. It almost seems wrong for Blizzard to be marking the servers Oceanic without them being based there. If the only difference is what time it is on the server, I don't understand why they're segregated from servers with a 4-hour time range among them.

Organized guilds tend to follow the established time zones for certain servers. At launch, Stormrage was an EST server and Kilrogg was a PST server. If you've got a 16 hour time difference, finding a guild that raids when you aren't sleeping can be a big deal.

That's why they advertised oceanic servers. It's more of a 'hey, let's get the players with similar schedules to congregate here, so that they can form guilds and raid on oceanic time rather than american'.

I guess I'm a little bit biased, but that makes more sense. I've played with a few Australian players, but it never really set in that they were so off of our time.

Key word there is rumours. I don't know if anyone knows for sure the exact reasons why.

What I do know, is that there was a poll conducted around open beta time, where people in Aus/NZ were asked if they wanted the game now, or whether to wait for servers in Aus/NZ which would've delayed the launch here by about the same time as it was going to be launched into Europe. The overwhelming response was that gamers didn't want to wait and that feedback was sent to Vivendi at that time.

There's a huge number of Australian/New Zealander/Singaporean and Japanese players playing on release servers like Blackrock.

A shame Telstra and Blizzard didn't come to an agreement but I suspect they significantly underestimated the number of people that would end up playing.

Conveniently for me US PST is -7 GMT and NZ is +13 GMT, which means at 6pm for me it's 8pm server time. Not too bad.

"And we can charge them paid transfers to Oceanic servers once the player base in their timezones dries up on their US servers."

Not that I am bitter about paying US$100 to transfer over my main, alt, farmer and bank characters.

Hosting in Australia is ridiculously expensive compared to the US, but surely there are cheaper options in SE asia (remember Oceanic - not Australian) that would still be an improvement for us. I'd imagine the main stumbling block here would be that by offering a service based in whichever country Blizz would be subject to any local laws (and a number of SE asian countries have rather draconian laws about internet services).

I've got so used to the latency I can live with it now (however it really puts me off PVP). IMO what would really be a vast improvement for Oceanic players would be maintenance during the middle of our night rather than losing Tuesday nights completely for raiding. Also, not sure if it occurs on all Oceanics, the incredibly annoying script o'clock (honour rollover) that used to regularly be 7:42pm AEST and is now anywhere early evening could be moved. The entire server lags for a few minutes and can be disastrously bad if you're mid-fight.

I'm guessing that the reason Oceanics are still tied into the US maintenance/script times is due to the fact that we share the same infrastructure. In terms of hopefully achievable improvements, a separate Oceanic cluster with our own infrastructure hosted in the US that allowed Oceanic timezone maintenance/scripts would get my vote.

Out of interest where are the European and Chinese servers located, which countries?

Arena vs hardcore Tichchondrius teams with 45ms ping when you have 350-550ms is *fun*

The European ones are in Paris (and I think some in Frankfurt also).

I'm also a long time Australian player. Playing with a team name of "Has triple your Latency" in BG9, when sometimes hell, it's probably closer to 10 times the ping americans get.

It truely is a different game with this latency, especially as a rogue playing at high level pvp (managed to get gladiator in 2v2 last season). I've watched videos of other high end rogues playing, seeing them do things as trivial as cheap shot a person running directly over them on a mount makes me cringe because it's simply not doable with Australian latency unless I pre-emptively move in the same direction and the stars align.

There were comments going around that Blizzard did actually approach Telstra (Australian's telco that actually owns the infrastructure, and majority owned by the government), yet they wanted to much money I believe. They also approached Internode from what I've gather (One of the premium level ISPs with the second largest game server farm after Telstra), but in the end, it came down to how much money it would cost to buy the bandwidth.

Whether we "deserve" servers is a moot point, if it was economically feasible they would, but currently the powers that be just want too much money. Currently there are 7(?) realms labeled oceanic, that are always "Full" (Realm list definition, not actually queued however) at prime time. But Blizzard know we have no-where to go unless another prominent MMO has a server in Australia, until then, they feel no pressure other than people leaving in dribs and drabs to actually set a server farm up here.

There are however a few things Blizzard could do. First of all the issue of maintenence/server restarts. I'm sure this will resound with anyone on an Oceanic server, but not even realized by those that aren't, every Tuesday, maintenence is done at 5am(?) East coast time i believe it is. During summer, this is smack bang middle of prime time for Australia, 8pm, and in winter, 10pm. On top of that, there are also frequent Emergency fixes etc that they deploy. Again, these are done at 5am US time, so most American's probably don't even realize they happen, but for Australians... middle of prime time. Another is Honor calculations, these happen like clock work every day, for americans, 3am, no-one would even know it happens, Australians, clock starts getting close to 8pm, again, right in the middle of our primetime, we know we are either going to wipe, or get lucky some time in the next 20 minutes when the server totally freezes up and you cant do anything, players regularly disconnect because of it.

There are other issues such as the games network code. It does a client side check, and a server side check for all actions, as a rogue, this really hurts. First of all the opponent has to be in range on my client screen for the client to let me do a given action. Then however, the opponent needs to also still be in range, half a second later, for the server to let me do the action. If the client side checks were removed you can at least try and lead your target, but not with the current mechanics.

It truely is frustrating, and makes you wish there was a mechanism to let you slap people through the internet when you hear americans complain about having lag in the 200s, when after playing the game for 2 years, on a 24mbit connection with a premium provider, I've never seen a green latency bar, and usually have at least 500ms ping during raids. Sometimes makes me wonder how some US raids can wipe on things when they have an extra half a second to react to things!

To summarize, QQ, you dont understand our pain!

Yep. The high latency certainly makes kicking Spirit Shock off RoS fairly stressful.

Not much to be done about it though. To move on a slight tangent, the prices of hosting in Australia have made the developers of Fury - who are in Australia - put their servers in the US. :P

I actually stopped playing my rogue mostly because of this problem. I swear to god if I see "You must be behind your target" one more time I will defenestrate my monitor. If I'm stealthed and I want to stop someone on a mount I have to have imp sap range and use sap first I should take a screenshot of my quartz bar when I'm home, trying to steady shot when the latency meter takes up 2/3 of the bar is a whole lot of fun. Ever tried to play a FPS at 500ms? I wouldn't recommend it, Blizzard is lucky their well thought out net code and game style lets them get away with it.

EDIT: Thought I should mention we are possibly the only country in the world that has download limits on our broadband deals

The worst thing that Blizzard did was to schedule the honour calculations right smack in the middle of primetime Aussie raiding time. It used to be ~8pm AEST before all the timezone changes when everything would freeze up, people start disconnecting & nobody can loot anything for about 5 minutes (queue the warlock laser show when they can't pickup soulstones). After the timezone changes shake out this weekend, the calculations will be done at ~10pm AEST which still happens in Aussie primetime and is really annoying for raiding - everybody has to take an enforced break during this time to wait for the calculations to finish.

That's the only major annoyance I have with the whole Oceanic servers on US soil deal. If Blizzard shift out the daily calculations by 2-3 hours, that would be ideal.

The unfortunate thing about the Oceanic label is that it doesn't deter or prevent non-Oceanic players from rolling there: During one of the 'droughts', as it were, between server releases (back when new servers every ~2 months was a common trend), reroll guilds simply agreed to play on Oceanic realms, feeling they would benefit from little-to-no competition during 'their' U.S. prime time.

It's also annoying for global cooldowns. My client will tell me my GCD is up and I can cast the PW:S I desperately need to cast right now. So it gets sent off to the server and my client goes into GCD mode. Only once it gets to the server my GCD on the server isn't finished or something so it sends back that I can't do that yet. Meanwhile it's a second later and that PW:S still hasn't gone off and I can't try again until the client gets the signal that it didn't get through. They really need to have a small queue so that if I send a request a fraction of a second before my GCD is over it will cast the spell right after the GCD is over.

My personal favourite is being spell locked while fake-casting before my cast bar appears. I've adjusted to it, and now have to cancel the cast before it shows up on screen. Unfortunately this means my UI regularly tells me I'm spell-locked when I'm not, and vice versa.

Overall I think a priest is one of the better classes to PvP with at 500+ ping though.

What exactly is the point of this thread other than letting oceanic players vent?

I play and raid on a US server, generally with a ping from somewhere between 400-600. Peak U.S. times it can go a whole lot higher. My guild have been discussing a transfer to an oceanic realm for a while now, and one of the main things raised by it was that Oceanic realms give preference to packets originating from the oceanic area.

Any idea if this is true, or not?

I'm one of telstra's many pissed off customers. I either have to quit smoking or get a job in order to afford better/decent internet with a cap > 12 gig. Back to whirlpool to research other options, I guess.

I would like to know where other servers are located in the Australian area, be it singapore or somwhere else. There are lot's of Singaporeans around on US servers, locating servers there could be an option. I was fairly sure Singaporeans weren't meant to be on US servers, but if there's a server farm already there, then adding in some 'US' servers there would be a negligible cost compared to opening a whole new server farm in Aus.

And yeah, priest is ok as 500 ping, hunter back at 60 was hell though, FD+trap was very hard to pull off in tight situations. Happily, the game is much more forgiving of us aussies now in PVP at least. Not dying in a few hits means that it's less twitchy, and removing things that aussies simply couldn't pull off from the game, like FD/vanishing with the flag in WSG then picking it back up. That was nearly impossible on Aussie pings.

This is an issue unfortunately dear to my heart.

As any high-end Rogue can tell you...PvP at anything over 500 ms latency becomes a nightmare. For a class who is so ridiculously easy to kite, there is little more frustrating than perpetually being out of range of a shiv or stun, or not being able to successfully time a cloak of shadows or vanish, purely because of in-game latency.

I think the point needs to be reinforced: 200 ms is a GODSEND for us down under. Finally, spells that can be kicked without precognitive powers that would make a psychic proud! The rarest moment to successfully Cheap Shot, Kidney Shot, Gouge, without latency rearing its ugly head and leaving you standing dumb as a post for all the world to see! Those precious green numbers are what make the game worth playing after another typical night of 5-600 ms lag in Kara, or 800ms in 25 mans...

Truth be told, Australia has perhaps the poorest telecommunications infrastructure in the developed world. It is of no surprise that Blizzard do not want to spend the time, and money, to invest on our shores; particularly since as a proportion of their playerbase, Australia simply can't contribute that much money (an aging population, a general 'outdoors' attitude to life, and the social stigma attached to video games in general are the main offenders.)

My hopes stretch vainly to WotLK, where it may behoove Blizzard to prepare a set of servers in anticipation of an Oceanic rise in population. But even if its never to be, and we never see double-digit latency in this country, at least the game is designed well enough that 90% of the content can be experienced before latency makes you have a mental breakdown.

Support group? It's always good to hear that while it IS a disadvantage (I'm definitely not saying it's something you can 'learn to overcome' - the disadvantage is there, and it's real) to be playing with a fraction of a second delay between all actions, there's a huge playerbase out there who are also both dealing with it and succeeding at various aspects of the game.

Re: GCD slapback (i.e. client-side GCD is up, but you get smacked by the tail end of server-side GCD and yet have a second client-side GCD) has more to do with latency flutter than actual latency, and can happen with 100ms pings as much as it does high latencies.

On a related note, it seems that the latest PTR build has overcome both the above and the original few stopcasting issues though, with what I believe is a pseudo server-side spell queue. I'd recommend anyone complaining about various PvE DPS and efficiency issues with high latency to go troll the PTR. What's being done on the PTR at the moment is a pivotal point for high latency play and it would really help if we gathered as much representation, testing and feedback as we can muster.

Hosting servers in China wouldn't be feasible due to the great firewall of China. Having them somewhere in southeast asia might not be too bad of an idea actually, since at least it's better than going to the US. However, as you've already played WoW for a year or two, would it be worth sacrificing the friends you've made on your server for a lower ping?

I actually travel a bit, so I started BC while in the US. Playing is very pleasant at 60 ms ping(Although the rogue experience described above at 500 ms is basically cat form at 60 ms...). However, now that I'm situated in Taiwan, the ping is about 600 ms or so. I'm happy just to see a yellow ping as opposed to red(0-300 green, 300-600 yellow, 600+ red). The difference is very dramatic, and don't even think about trying to go cat form at this ping. Speccing out of feral has helped me keep my sanity since /stopcasting at least alleviates most of the pain in PvE encounters.

For PvP encounters, I just have to remind myself that it's just a game, and due to the ping, sometimes there's really nothing I could have done. However, it's still annoying that a poorly played stunlock rogue actually benefits from this at high ping. Example at 600 ms ping:

Example of a perfectly timed stunlock:
Cheapshot 4s, gouge 5s, kidney shot 6s etc...
Total of 15 seconds

Example of a poorly timed stunlock:
Cheapshot 4s, 0.5s gap, gouge 5s, 0.5s gap, kidney shot 6s...
Total of 16 seconds

The poorly played rogue gets another free second where I simply cannot do anything due to 600 ms ping. As soon as the server gets the message that I tried to cast something, I'm stunned again. Them's the breaks I guess.