Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog

Australia getting our own Wow servers is somewhat big news. For years its what our Top Gamers have asked for. The extra 180-220 ms delay meant that we were worse off in PVP and when pushing the harder content.

Oh it was only 180 – 220ms?

It may not sound like much, and you don’t notice the difference in things like LFR, but it wasn’t just the ping – it was how smooth and consistent the connection was, and the priority our ISP’s gave to our gaming connections. Our own servers should improve the over all reliability of our connection, not just give us reduced lag.

I used to use a Ping reducing proxy it used to bring me down from sometimes Yellow MS to most of the time green. It’s been a lot better the last 12 months, and I noticed with Battlenet already logged in, wow didn’t seem to be benefiting at all from any reduced ping via the proxy, so I stopped using it, but I’ve not been trying to do edge of the content type stuff, and I gave up on Rateds.

I can’t see Aussie servers making me want to play more, four, five years ago it would have been awesome sauce. H LK, or even some of the things with Fire in Dragon soul and less ticks of damage we would have noticed the improvement, and I guess there’s still plenty of juice in the game and players to warrant this, and it will give our Hardcore gamers a better chance at equally competing for first kills in raids.

I wonder how many will stay and if there will be a mass exodus from foreign soil, and if ex Pat Aussies will come home to Oceanic. A lot of people left over the years looking for better pools of players chasing harder content.
Some like me came back. I found a guild I have stayed in for the longest ever in my Wow playing. ( 2 years in January next year ) Casual and serious enough to get 10/14 heroic SoO and I’ve been ok with that.

I have two 90’s still on Proudmoore that I could bring over as part of the free transfers to Oceanic so we can make best use of the Aussie servers – but I think I will leave them there. The guild doesn’t seem to mind me popping in now and then ( well they haven’t kicked me yet ) the x server mail for account bound heirlooms would still be available.

The only really disappointing thing with Aussie based servers, is the server maintenance times don’t appear to be changing.
While we are seeing a lot less full shutdowns, and early on it was every tuesday guaranteed so it was a forced break from wow, and sometimes we ended up in a cocktail bar or a pub talking about Wow. Now there are more restarts so things like daily’s can be accomplished. The unreliability of our time Tuesday night availability is that its never been plan-able raid night, and while most of the guilds Ive been in have run a combination of Sunday/Monday/Wednesday/Thursday night raids – an extra available day might allow more guilds to have 3 raids a week, or shorter raiding times on some nights.

So yes, the Aussie servers are a good thing, and a very long time needed thing.