That was at (EU) release, almost 3 years ago. By now there are more than 5 datacentres in use, as far as I know. In fact, pretty much each battlegroup is in its own data center (though there is an artifical language barrier there, too, the english BG ruin could very well be in the same center as the german BG Verderbnis).

In the past, pre-BG era you could map out which realm is in which data center when they had a total connectivity loss to one of them, so you saw which realms it affected. On maintenance days ocassionally, an entire data center had issues and their realms remained down 3 hrs longer or so. This was then all visible on the realm-status page. Together with a few token chars on these realms and IP traces you could map them out a bit.

Now with the battle groups, that's pretty much the separation, I haven't yet seen realms in different BGs having the same IP destination as those within the BG. However I've onyl did this shortly after the introduction of the BGs, so it may have changed.

The english language EU realms are divided into 10 BGs, so that would mean at least 10 data centers throughout Europe. Some are in France, some are in Germany and I'd expect at least one in the UK. Switzerland hasn't got one, I'd know that as I have strong ties to the ISP scene here.

The fact that they built new servers doesn't mean they opened new data centers. You've got to remember that Europe is a lot smaller then the US, let alone the difference between US and AU. Doing some quick googles, The distance from Stockholm to Athens is about 2400km, while LA to NY is nearly 4k. Physical distance is not really a big issue latency wise, with these kind of distances. Putting all data centers on a compromise between physical distance and infrastructure would make sense, and Paris and Frankfurt fit these criteria. So why not build extra servers where you already have a company infrastructure.

I am wondering what causes these high latencies between US and AU though. I just, to test, pinged a server that as far as I know is in Florida (from Amsterdam). The ping is around 110ms. Is there an infrastructure issue between US an AU?

On a related note, My ping to the WoW firewall (the point where you can no longer see pings on a traceroute) is only 20-25ms, and my ingame latency, in raid, is often 100-120ms. Clearly data takes a while inside the WoW network.

I play on American servers from England and have never really had a problem. My ping is consistently around 450ms but being able to break Archimonde's old 1 second fears was enough to convince me it's really not that big of a deal.

Prior to launch there was an official survey done by Ausgamers on behalf of Blizzard and the consensus was to have US servers for various reasons which i forget. Having played EQ for 3 years under the same circumstances at the time i thought most people would vote for Australian based servers but that wasn't the case.

EDIT

I remember now. Blizzard asked if we were prepared to wait 6 months after launch for Australian servers and the result was a resounding no and thus they scrapped that idea.

Link - AusGamers.com - Australia's Games Community

Having worked in South East Asian mass multiplayer gaming for two years, I can tell you that hosting servers here are a terrible idea. Except maybe Philippines, or possibly Thailand. Anywhere else just won't have the infrastructure necessary to (reliably!) support a WoW service.

/random2cents.

Hamburg, Frankfurt in Germany and Paris in France as far as I know. You can check wowwiki for an exact location (city-wise) of the servers.It's quite hard for people from eastern europe or middle-east to get ping less then 200. So we kinda re-route our traffic or use proxies instead!

I've been a long-time Blizzard game player and this issue has popped up in EVERY SINGLE GAME. The end result remains the same, unfortunately. The cost-benefit ratio is just not in their favour; our infrastructure is poor at best and largely monopolised by Telstra because of old government links.

The best period of gaming for Aussies existed for Starcraft and Broodwar, where we were allowed for a long, long period of time to maintain our own servers (Granted the latency in those games is client-client, rather than client-server). It allowed us to establish our own communties and play with local players, producing the best experience so far.

Does anyone know the logistics of maintaining a hub of WoW servers? (aside from the obvious payment issues)

Hi Martyr (if you're the same guy from ^DAG^ :P)

At times their are infrastructure issues. They may have stopped doing it but for a while some traffic at peak was routed through Asia and using the cable from their to cross the pacific. Funnily enough in the beta testing for Diablo II they assigned us too Asian servers but I with others sent them traceroutes showing we were reaching the Asian servers via California.

At this point I think the best that could be hoped for is seperate maintenance for Oceaniac servers but since they are part of the Bloodlust battlegroup with American servers I doubt that is even possible.

My trace routes usually go:

Melbourne Hop ~50ms
Sydney Hop ~70ms
LA Hop ~200ms
etc....

So the problem is the undersea links to America which several companies are working to install new links (including Google I hear!) at the moment, if this makes any difference remains to be seen. I don't know why the AusGamers vote ended up like that, are people completely retarded? I would've waited 6months to get real Australian servers no worries.

After reading the comments of that AusGamers survey, it seems that the 6 month wait was only for billing and customer service facilities. No guarantee was placed on the provision of servers after 6 months, or if ever.

As for the link between Australia and America, I wouldn't expect ping speeds to improve by a new link being established. The Southern Cross Cable Network covers a distance of about 14,000 KM, from coast to coast. Traffic across this fibre-optic link is at best 70ms. The theoretical maximum speed of light could do this distance in 46.7 ms, but that would require the data to be travelling inside a vacuum, and it would not involve multiple repeaters that are required for signal strength.

To get to LA you add about 20-30ms. So under a best case scenario, the trip from Sydney to LA is about 100ms. This is fairly close to drunkmunky's observed value of 130ms. I'm sure routing issues and congestion would explain the difference.

Ohh, and hi D3cadent, good to see you're still around gaming Bring on SC2.

traceroute to 12.129.225.24 (12.129.225.24), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 203-96-92-125.ipnets.xtra.co.nz (203.96.92.125) 0.290 ms 0.289 ms 0.318 ms
2 GGI-MDR-INT.xtra.co.nz (203.96.111.206) 0.463 ms 0.519 ms 0.569 ms
3 so1-2-0.tkbr9.global-gateway.net.nz (203.96.120.74) 0.942 ms 0.995 ms 1.152 ms
4 so0-3-0.labr5.global-gateway.net.nz (202.50.232.250) 156.935 ms 157.005 ms so-1-1-2.labr5.global-gateway.net.nz (202.50.232.234) 156.557 ms

Hop 3 is the Auckland/NZ end of the SCC, hop 4 is the US end.

That's the biggest problem of all...I have never understood why all Oceanic realms are given their own Battlegroup, even if the physical server location never changes, with maintenance times/honour and arena calculations/instance resets determined by the Battlegroup. I can see why they might have problems changing the maintenance times for these servers if they are tied in Battlegroups with US servers...but where is the problem in changing the maintenance of an entire server group?

Maybe Blizzard are just tight with the pocket strings and prefer to do all their maintenance in one fell swoop. Seems kinda silly.

G'day, I'm the Internode rep that made that post on WP (About Oceanic servers)

Internode 1st approached Blizzard about hosting WoW servers in Australia at the 2004 E3, we had "disscussions" with Blizzard on and off for a few years and in the end we were told that its just not ecconomically viable for them to run servers here.

Nothing to do with Telstra being the only "true" provider (Which is bullshit) and nothing to do with available space in a Data Centre.

Just pure $ invested vs potential return.

I don't suppose you're allowed to give rough figures on what they were talking about? I remember petitioning OSI long and hard for an Australian UO server, which did happen eventually. Of course, UO required server confirmation for every step your character took, so the effects of lag were *much* more pronounced. Thank god for UOExtreme!

Thanks for posting that. I've been involved in Australian IT since before we were connected to the rest of the world, and I always understood that the reason against the servers were because of the asymmetrical peering relationships between Australia and the US partners.

I've been out of the networking space for many a long year now, but is that still the case ? Or does Australia have full partnership for data interchange now ?

Yes, international transit costs are still the reason internet access costs so much here. We (Internode) have interconnect agreements with some of the larger bodies in the US (google, yahoo, MS etc...) but traffic is still too one sided for (cheap/free) peering arangements.

That and there is still only 1 viable connection to the US (Southern Cross). PIPE networks "Project Runway" might introduce some competitive pricing, but its still a good 6-12 months away.

Well, yeah, the fact that if Blizzard don't install servers in Australasia, the majority of those people will still pay their subscription fee anyway and play on US servers. Like I do, and like you presumably do.

As elluded to earlier in the thread the major thing that I can't seem to get my head around is the differences I see from a trace and the in game latency.
If I run a net statistic and then trace do the IP I'm connecting to on port 6112 my latency on the final ATT hop before it times out is 130-150.
If I trace to us.logon.worldofwarcraft.com I get around 120ms. If I played with that latency I would be /dancing irl.

Why is there such a massive discrepancy?

Additionally I get about 220ms to battle.net when playing on their servers.
190 to West Coast BF2.. (Not that >100 is playable on an FPS mind)

I guess it's because the wow servers have thousands of people logged in at once? God knows what their internal network looks like as well, would probably be pretty crazy though with the number of server clusters they would need. I noticed that right after server restarts I log on quickly and I get 200-300ms for about 5mins until everyone else logs back on.

I live in Auckland, NZ. My ping time to the server (12.129.233.23) is a pretty steady 200-220ms. However, my in-game latency varies wildly between 350ms - 650ms.

I have a friend in Christchurch; his ping time to the server is 160-180, and his in-game latency 210-250.

After some investigating (detailed below), I've discovered that my TCP traffic to the server is being "shaped" by intervening ISPs -- either in the US, or at NZ's Global-Gateway.

If I connect to my friend's system via an SSH tunnel, then my in-game ping is about 250-300. (I am on ADSL, but he is on TelstraClear cable which only entails about a 10ms delay to his ISP. Also, his route to the US is completely different to mine (his ISP has its own chunk of the cross-Pacific cable), it goes straight from his ISP to ALTER.NET in the states, which then goes directly to the network that the server is on. My connection goes via Global-Gateway, then Sprintlink which I have had latency problems in the past with as well.

So, perhaps you need to try shopping around for ISPs, seeing which ones have the fastest in-game time to the server.

Also, I discovered by Google that there are several US-based services that let you connect to them on port 80 and tunnel your WoW connection over. I am currently on a 3-day trial of PingFu: HTTP Tunnel service for anonymous surfing: Hide IPs, bypass proxy servers & bypass firewalls -, and my in-game latency is about 280 - 420; not great and a wide variation, but substantially better than my ISP's default connection path.

I've been playing WoW on a US server basically since launch, and on one of the classes which is probably most affected by a bad latency. Honestly I am completely used to it, and doubt I would leave my raiding guild behind for a lower latency. There's been times where it has been an issue, most notably Tranq Shot back when Tranq shot had to be perfectly timed, but in the end, we always found ways to deal with it.

Communication is also key, for example, any split second Misdirection shot (E.G. Illidan) I always get one of the American Hunters in the raid to cover, and you have to be honest in saying "I can't do this, my ping just makes it too hard".

It doesn't seem to matter so much as a DPS class, but I can see latency being an issue for tanking classes, a 400ms tank stance-dancing fears, just doesn't work. However I recently updated my rig, and went from 5fps to a constant 75fps while playing, which also changed from a weekly death on Archimonde, to never dying on Archimonde. I have not had one death due to standing for too long in an AoE, Doomfires, Cratering after Air Bursts, and so on, since upgrading my rig (Although i've certainly died to poor decisions and bad mistakes!). I am convinced that graphical performance affects play a lot more than latency does.

PvP however is a different kettle of fish. If it were a First Person Shooter type game there would be local Australian servers for Australian players to use, however WoW is unique in that its structure doesn't allow for such a thing. There's been so many times where I have straight up lost at PvP just due to latency. Interrupts not landing in time to stop a heal due to being delayed, and also just how much of an impact Line of Sight has somebody with a higher latency. I have not yet tried PvP on an Oceanic realm, against players with similar ping, but I'm not exactly prepared to reroll to find out either.

If Blizzard ever decided to make local servers in the Australia region, I think its really going to be for PvP ultimately. You can function very well in raids on a 400ms latency, and the current Oceanic flagged servers really do their job well to attract people who work and play in a similar time-zone to one place, but ultimately its going to be PvP which decides if they are going to put local servers in Australia. Probably the only thing slowing more raiding guilds down on the Oceanic realms down is the difficulty which comes with tanking on a high ping, if anything.

I'm going to play devil's advocate and argue it's not that bad. Ping can make life difficult but it's not prohibitive. This is key. 1.5s casts are still interruptable, you just have to be a little faster. No encounter in the game is not doable. A friend of mine plays in currently the #4 ranked 3v3 on Bloodlust - all Australian players. A number of guilds have downed Illidan, and generally speaking the distribution of guilds at content points is the same for Oceanic players as it is for U.S. Players.

I think in some regards, playing with other Oceanic players day-in day-out means you quickly become habituated to it and it just becomes a part of your existence. The only thing I literally cannot do with our ping is maintain a 1:1.5 rotation, and interrupt 1.2-1.3s casts. The former is impossible and the latter is just a bit too fast.

Edit: Missed the 2nd page. Looks like people have been playing devil's advocate for a while >_>

Edit 2: I might also add that although oceanic players (ex. Jubei'thos) are typically lumped in to the one Battlegroup (Bloodlust), this benefit is paradoxically counterbalanced by putting us with some of the most pvp-centric and hardcore servers in the game, e.g. Tichondrius. Not a whine, just an interesting example of iatrogenic effects.