While its true FPSes rely on latency much more than an MMO, for many in WoW are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to timing their combinations in both PVP and raids over an American player.

Also, i have to question why our bandwidth costs are so high?
If Origin could put up an Oceanic Ultima Online server a decade ago, when bandwidth costs were at their highest, then why cant Blizzard put up any?
Maybe they are looking for bandwidth in the wrong places.

Wow, you're delmortis, I used to play on jubei but I never knew that was you.

Since I started back though I've been on dath'remar. I went care bear, couldn't stomach the thought of levelling another character up from 1 to 80 on a pvp server, just way too frustrating.

If Origin could put up an Oceanic Ultima Online server a decade ago, when bandwidth costs were at their highest, then why cant Blizzard put up any?

I'd imagine the requirements (bandwidth and hardware) for a UO server back in the day would have been far, far, far, far, far less than for WoW now.

Thankyou for the this interview, As an avide wow player for many years I feel i need to at least voice my feelings on this topic.

The passion and sentiments put forward by gamer .. while being perhaps somewhat brash and abrassive .. ARE PRETTY MUCH EXACTLY HOW I FEEL AS WELL.

it seems to me that the majority of you who have commented on what he has said either a) don't play wow, and as such don't matter. b) do play wow but not a great deal of the more intense end of the game ie. arena, progression or c) are the kind of person happy to just take whats given.

countless are the times I have dreamed of being able to play wow with low latency .. I've never played with anything under about 370ish minimum .. and usually more like 450.

I main a warrior who is a melee class, positional latency as i call it .. is my bane .. the game is an inherintly mobile game .. for pvp I need to be within range of my target in order to hit it, or use the majority of my abilities. Latency is a direct modifier to the difficulty of this. I am not inclined to go any further into the detail of how this effects me simply because its complicated, suffice to say, combating positional latency requires an extreme amount of concentration in the form of prediction.

I feel that comparing wow to fps games is stupid .. they are not the same .. imo fps is pure twitch and spacial awareness and so i can see how those who play them mostly, consider wow to be requiring far less in terms of quality ping. I don't agree with this, but i'm not going to try to explain why .. its pointless .. i think that gamer has attempted to do this and its fallen on deaf ears.

In the last 5 years I think its been .. that i have been playing .. I've given blizzard more than $1000 of my money and while I have def gotten my moneys worth in time played, I feel that this is a substancial amount of money .. and that perhaps considering the amount in comparison to .. any other game .. we might be talking about an undertaking or investment that is surpassing .. any other game

I don't care about how viable it is for blizz to set up an aus server .. I just want them to do it .. simple.

I've been saying it for years .. I would be more than happy to pay extra for it.

i'll start out by saying 'Yes, i completely understand why Blizzard aren't hosting servers in aus' and I don't expect them to given the massive costs compared to their current hosting solutions.

But gamer is correct - in high end arena, ping makes a big difference, and anyone who is saying that the ping doesn't make a difference for an MMO is wrong and is simply not playing the game at a level that you would notice.

Playing a feral druid, I have to be behind the target to shred. Now i use the Internode WoW gateway so my ping is ~250-300ms which isn't bad, but there are still times i get the "you must be behind your target" when im dead on their back. Another time you really notice the lag is when using feral charge. You end up yards away from the target instead of dead on their back. And I notice the improvement when going from no gateway to gateway'd wow, but its still not perfect.

My brother (who got Rank 1 (RGlad) in 5's last season) said he was about at the skill cap for his class on his ping. On a tougher battlegroup he wouldn't have been able to win it purely due to some of the reasons gamer listed. 500ms is an exaggeration, but even using tunnels 250ms seems to be about as low as it can go, and that is enough to make a difference. The reaction times you require in FPS games are only a few ms faster than what you require in top end pvp.

But as others have mentioned, Australians are obviously happy to continue to pay their subscription to play on US based servers, so why would they change it ?

I go by Delmortis or Althor in WoW though.

oh hey I raided with you last night (pug 25 TOC that fell apart on Anub due to leaving emo's). I'm Aeioula (NE druid).

last edited by Strik3r at 11:21:35 28/Apr/10

but even using tunnels 250ms seems to be about as low as it can go

I use telstra dsl 2 here in Brisbane with a lower ping subscription and I sit on about 180-190ms at all times including in 25 man raids.

Without LP i sit on about 250ms with the TCPAckFrequency registry change.

I am completely happy paying the extra $8 a month to LP to play Warcraft at a lower latency it does make a difference.

I would also be happy to pay the extra 48 a month to Blizzard to put a server out here in Australia. But I see it as a pretty simple business decision for them. Income > costs. Until it is financially viable for them to put a server here I would suggest enjoying the other benefits to living in Australia like enjoying our golden polution free beaches, sunshine, democracy and lack of R18+ game classfication(had to say it).

If you want to play Warcraft with a 50ms connection i suggest you move to the USA and buy yourself a gun to keep safe over there.

I just want to chuck out a big "THANK YOU" for those people who stepped forward and showed your support of what I was trying to get across. I don't always have the right attitude/words to do so, but you guys sure do.

(Esp thanks to Gloth who registered an account just to say his bit/support my comments)



last edited by gamer at 15:18:37 29/Apr/10

Christ I still play on blackrock...
Would switch to a oceanic realm, but I don't want to pay (what was it?) ~$30 per character to transfer.

Frostmourne - Tsunami here

I don't think anyone ever said WoW servers hosted locally wouldn't be a good thing. I'm sure everyone who plays WoW in Australia would love the lower pings, but no matter how much it would help you in Arena or how much it would improve your game, its still not going to happen if its not a good business move for Blizzard. End of the day, they're a business, they're not going to, out of the kindness of their heart, throw hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars into setting up the infrastructure needed to host servers locally here. If all the Australian WoW players suddenly stopped playing WoW and refused to play till we had local servers, maybe it would then become a good business move to put servers here, but thats not going to happen, so they really have no reason to do it.

You can argue with all the passion you want, but business is business.

Quotes by Khel

I don't think anyone ever said WoW servers hosted locally wouldn't be a good thing.

but I really couldn't care that much if we never get them. The game is still perfectly playable, and its easy enough to adapt to any small problems the lag creates.

Riiighhtt...

The main point is we need people who are going to interview wow devs etc to have a f***ing clue and be fighting the fight to at least try.

I think the wow players among us understand just the same if not more (due to their years of devotion) about how insurmountable the odds are that we'll get any services presented to Australia.

That's no reason not to try and to ask the hard questions during interviews when your meant to represent us.



last edited by gamer at 18:54:03 29/Apr/10

Yeah, I don't really care that much if we get them, I'm happy to keep playing the game the way it is, but its not like I'd stand in the way of them or actively rally against getting them, of course it would be better to have local servers. I just don't see it as an issue that makes or breaks my experience with the game. And since theres realistically jack all chance of getting them, I figure its easier to just adapt to how things are.

I'm not anti-local server or anything. Would it be better? Absolutely. Do I need them to play the game? No, not really. Thats just me personally though, I'm not speaking for every WoW player in Australia, people who want to top the rankings in Arena and stuff are probably in a different boat, but once again thats such a tiny percentage of people that even if they quit playing WoW altogether, it'd be like a drop or water in the ocean for Blizzard,it would have no noticeable impact at all. So they're not going to spend the money setting up servers to cater for those people.

^^ QFT.. but i couldn't be bothered quoting so... this is awkward.

I like US servers, kicking the asses of a small minority locally over and over isn't much of a challenge, I'd rather play with/against the guilds I've played other games with in the past, lag or no lag

1. Players in the US... 100,000s if not Millions.
2. Players in Australia 100,000 if your lucky.
3. Bandwidth, hosting, salaries etc etc no cost benefit if anything more expensive. Yes we have Oceanic and Latin America servers but they are hosted with the US based servers for economy of scale.
4. If your that upset vote with your feet and leave the game, if WoW population dropped significantly that they had to start shutting down servers instead of adding them they they would start to listen.

No one is saying that it wouldn't be nice to have < 100ms pings but the reality is it will never happen in the short term. Hell some of the Americans that I play with have 200ms+ pings because they have s***ty internet just like we do here.

WoW is past it's prime IMO and since aussie servers have never happened so far, I doubt they ever will. Just use lowerping or something like that and curse telstra for being f*****s.

The main point is we need people who are going to interview wow devs etc to have a f***ing clue and be fighting the fight to at least try.

It's not that Blizzard is filled with clueless noobs who don't understand how wonderful it would be for you to get 60ms pings to their server. They've done the maths and have realised that it simply isn't cost effective to put a server here.

I think the wow players among us understand just the same if not more (due to their years of devotion) about how insurmountable the odds are that we'll get any services presented to Australia.

Devotion? Hah! Take your feelings of entitlement and f*** yourself to death with them. Do you bitch and moan about your devotion to Coles, Westfield or Today Tonight?

---

There's one very simple reason that Australia doesn't generally get directly provisioned for MMO servers. As a potential market we're basically non-existent in the grand scheme of things, and the people who greatly suffer from it are a tiny percentage of that.

wow this is awesome. never played the game but i think my double spelled paladin special troll would beat your checkmate queen/rook hook any day.

from an outsiders point of view the analogies of basic business strategy seems to override any jedi fat kid temper rants.

i see your schwartz is as big as mine!!!

Play a rogue in arenas and tell me your not at a disadvantage to Americans :)

i can deal without Australian servers if they let us have proxies, the moment they ban proxies you're going to see a massive decline in aus subs

The main point should be raider, we shouldnt have to pay for a second service (proxy) just to play the game with a minimum acceptable latency (<250ms).

I'm late on this thread here but I agree with gamer 100%. I played WoW since the beginning but a source of constant frustration was positional issues in PvP playing my rogue. They changed Mutilate to accomodate this but constantly being out of range when you're right on your opponent's ass (on your screen at least) is the most frustrating thing!

Even as a Mage in the Battlegrounds, watching my Pyros apparently hit targets first only to see some Yank getting all the killing blows was fricking annoying!

I loved the game and can only imagine how amazing it must be to play it with a true 6ms ping - especially in PvP.

Maybe it doesn't make financial sense to put servers in Aus, but what about putting some in Singapore and tapping into the South-East Asian market as well? Maybe that would be win/win for Australians, Kiwis, Indonesians, Malayasians etc.?

And gamer - mate I know EXACTLY what you mean. I felt the same way but it's impossible to get this through to the casual style of player.

The main point should be raider, we shouldnt have to pay for a second service (proxy) just to play the game with a minimum acceptable latency (<250ms).

what gives you this undeserved sense of entitlement to the point where you expect a profit seeking company to commit to a hugely cost-ineffective capital investment just so you can have a marginally improved user experience?

also, how lol would it be if gamer was being his own wingman itt.

What bothers me is that Blizz haven't introduced some of features, these lower ping services include.
I hear most of them get their speed increases from disabling packet caching and routing traffic through more direct and bandwidth heavy paths.

Well, I agree with gamer, he should be cut some slack. I can tell he is a dedicated wow gamer and has had a lot of wow experience.

Theoretically - When you begin to insinuate a situation where a gamer who has spent roughly 3 years of wow playing, adding the fact that an addicted wow player would on average spend 50% of their lives playing wow and every night your pvping and arenaing and you die and you know the reason you've died is not so much skill vs skill but higher latency vs lower latency, over time this frustration will build up and each day you keep hoping that things will change and then your hope is squashed because Blizzard doesn't think its economically the best business choice to make.

f*** that f*** them, but you can't really blame them.

I Do not think anyone has mentioned the new proposed plans Telstra has made that could fix everyones problems. They are building fiber optic cables under the sea directly from Aus - US....10x faster or something. thats 450ms to about 150ms

But its an 8 year project. So the gamers today will probably have a family then and don't need to escape reality.

You guys might forget that although businesses here factor in the costs of local hosting in to their budgets, on the scale of equipment Blizzard want leased it becomes out of the realm of being competitive compared to what they've grown used to paying back home.

Remember, American companies are greedy :p

gamer = hunter

whinging bitch nubs who think they're pvp veterans and blame their loss on latency, flock together