You may have heard over the last few years Aussies complain about our lag, the time zone differences, and that our gaming experience is affected by the distance between us, sitting at our PC’s at home, and the location of the servers, somewhere in the USA – it seems my battlegroup Bloodlust is based in California. We use services to lower our ping to reduce the lag to make us more competitive in places like arena.
The solution – to enhance our gaming experience, reduce lag, and actually cast spells when we actually press the button/click is to have a local based server. If this ever happened, more than likely the Aussies you see pop up on your servers, in your raids, in your pugs, sprouting patriotic sentiments in general chat, we would all huddle together and play on our locally based server.
I would miss the variety that being able to play with people from different countries brings. Language, words, expressions, colloquialisms, humour, we get a better understanding of world events, increased general knowledge, we actually get to talk and interact with people rather than just read about it.
On a dedicated servers, sure we would still get the Kiwis, and maybe some of the asia based players, but our player group, and therefore progression would lean more towards our standard peak hours. Playing outside that normal peak would mean less people around, less chance of getting groups for quests, raids, dungeons, ect – because of the significant differences in playing quality I can’t see many people willing to put up with the Lag connecting to us – we do it because we have to, everyone else would have a choice.
In Bloodlust – LFGs / Random BG’s even raids on BR run 24/7 I didn’t quite understand what we had untill I found, even queuing as a tank on my baby Tank , the delays in a LFG forming and the general lack of people around. As my American friend explained, what do you expect it’s early morning for us. Brynhild is on Galakrond which is the Retaliation battlegroup, and it’s been dead when I’ve logged in my play times. She got invited to a small guild, but I was never on when they were, which is probably why I got kicked.
It would also mean that our ability to compete in things like Arena would still never really be fixed. Arena would still have Lag because the matches involving American servers would still have the same issues.
Arguably, while the lag affects all Australian players, it only matters to a small percentage, progression raiders, Arena players.
It may impact us more in rated battlegrounds in Cata where winning and losing will mean a lot more, however our battlegroup seems to do ok win /lose is around 50%
To lose the ability to get to talk to so many people from other places in the world, because the server population would get very secular I would rather not have a dedicated server.
Provided by 
Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog 
Try to see the other side. [generic anti-Australian pun]. Sorry, I’m having an off day.
But Klep – we are everyones mate’s.. Everyones invited over for a BBQ… how can you not like us 😛
It’s kangaroo isn’t it?
mmm kangaroo steaks, lovely 🙂
I’ve never actually had Kangaroo – The Australian Hotel has a Coat of arms Pizza with Kangaroo and Emu on it, but I never go with anyone willing to try it with me 😛
Isn’t the idea to get servers located on this half of the world? If servers are placed somewhere in the southern hemisphere – or Asia – then that benefits almost everyone on this side of the globe.
Barthilas is a mix of Asian, Australian, New Zealand and islanders – all would benefit from a server closer to home.
I play with about 3 Americans in my guild (I think they work night shifts) and – wow – when they get Defile you can really see the difference latency makes to the game. I swear our Holy Priest has his own personal blink.
I guess if servers opened up located in a server farm in the southern hemisphere we would be leaving behind our current bloodlust battlegroup. But I think it’s worth it.
From what I understand, the main problem has to be with the Telecoms especially in Australia, and not so much with Blizzard’s desire.
I mean think about this, why would Blizzard use North American servers for Australia when it already has servers in both China and Taiwan?
I’ve read a bit more about this from some knowledgeable Australian-mates/Kiwis, and I am sure I can find some of the information if it’s desired. But last I heard, a huge part of this was with Australian ISP and not so much Blizzard.
But back to my point, if Taiwan servers are cheaper than American servers, why not allow Australians to play from Taiwan? If American servers are cheaper than Taiwanese server, then why not have Taiwanese play from American servers? — this is somewhat rhetorical, I am sure the answer is: Blizzard is willing to use local servers if possible.
All said though, I’ve been graced to play with a lot of Australians/Kiwis on both servers I’ve ever played on. My first guild was Australian… so was my first real raiding guild… and at present the guild Crux/Deus ex Crux is here on Dragonblight. It’s really nice, I’ve got maybe 5-10 friends I talk to daily in Crux (plus some Brits who play here for some reason).
So are you advocating the removal of Oceanic servers? There are 10 servers flagged as “Oceanic” however they are still located in the US Datacenters, simply with a different timezone.
Moving those servers to a location closer to Oceania would result in significantly lower ping for all players already playing on them.
Play a melee class in a pvp environment for a few days and then see how you feel about being touchy feely about talking to people in different timezones – its so incredibly frustrating that you have to be almost twice as good in PVP to be equal with bad players who are playing on sub100ms latency compared to your 200ish with Lowerping or Wowtunnels.
Try playing a tank and trying to position multiple mobs on a high ping, trying to interrupt a fast cast, or on Lich King, try to have the entire raid stacked and move out of defile rather than having to have the entire raid spread out because with such high latency theres no way you can reactively place defile.
Servers in Oceania would result in significantly more Oceanic guilds and Oceanic pvp’ers competing in the world rankings because at the moment we’re at a crippling disadvantage due to latency.
Cassandri, Its been a decade since the Diablo 2 beta but I gave a lot of feedback back then to put Australians on US servers over Asia due to the better Ping to the US. Thankfully they did.
Their was a time for Australian wow servers and that was year zero, Now we all have our communities and more would be lost then gained if people started chasing the better ping.
Proudmoore seems to be slipping a bit these days towards a more US based population ,but it has been 5 years after all since Blackrock and Proudmoore where chosen as the Unofficial Aussie servers. Logging into eq at 9pm Sydney and seeing a grand total of 11 People online? No thanks.
I love the Aussies! You’re not allowed to leave, and not just because the raid alliance I belong to is run by one.
Of course, I would understand if you did. I live in eastern time (USA) and my server’s mountain time (2 hours off). I find it vaguely annoying that my server gets hopping about the time I am starting to get sleepy, and I can only imagine how much worse it must be when 1 pm my time (11 am server) is 3 am yours.
Can Blizz do something to decrease the lag for y’all without giving you your own servers? I would be completely in favor of that.
I’d actually like to see language servers and battlegroups rather than regional ones, but I know lag issues make that impractical. Yes, people would be on wildly different times, but that would (hopefully) keep the server more active. I could hop on early afternoon and go raid with some Brits, or wake up early and raid with people in SE Asia. And it’d allow people with wacky work schedules to more easily find raids and guilds that are on when they are.
I’m in the bloodlust group as well (dath’remar) , playing from NZ and I enjoy PvP/Arena.
I’m not hardcore about it so I don’t mind the lag.
While moving servers to Asia as Cassandri says would benefit us and I don’t think would cause to many lag issues for the american players who play on these servers as well.
However I can’t really see that happening, as raids/dungeons etc do run all the time and for the most part work well.
You know, for what it’s worth, I made the assumption _every_ Australian/Kiwi knew about changing the TCP/Ack settings and what not. But I think it’s an unsafe assumption.
This is a solid read for anyone who is super interested: http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t17761-server_locations_latency_australia/
If anything at all, read these two posts: http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t17761-server_locations_latency_australia/p2/#post534763
It is probably the biggest reason why there aren’t Australian servers. (Oh and for what it’s worth, Pewsey is a friend of mine. He’s working in IT for some 20+ years, he’s absolutely knowledgeable on the topic).
Other thigns to take away, if you haven’t already done the TCP/Ack fix, I suggest reading through http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=3271183880&sid=1 you should gain enormous latency reduction IF you have not done it before. Of course, I made the erroneous assumption all Australians knew about it. But that’s an assumption.
Now one more thing, I hear a lot of people mentioning lowerping, I’d like to point out there are some alternatives. http://www.wowtunnels.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=827 for example is half the price of lowerpring. $3 or so a month.
Anyways, I hope I didn’t come off being too pugnacious… just trying to shine some light / be helpful.