The Plight of Australian Players
by Elizabeth Harper 
Aug 28th 2006 at 10:00AM
Perhaps you're not aware, but Australian and North American World of Warcraft players share the same realms. This has created all sorts of troubles for the Australian player approaching the game. Firstly, sharing a game-space with North American players means that many players are in a time zone far separated from your own, and finding instance and raiding groups during the hours when most of the players are sleeping is a problem. Secondly, regularly scheduled maintenance, set during a low activity time for those on the right continent, hits right during prime playing time. While, more recently, Blizzard has been rolling out realms specifically flagged "Oceanic" and set to Australian time zones, they're still located with the rest of the North American realms and subject to the same maintenance schedule. And with few Oceanic servers available, they've become flooded with players and subject to lag and instability. Whether Blizzard will be able to fix its Oceanic mess or not... well, we'll see.
[Thanks, Dave]
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Bugs
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Gamerz22 Sep 1st 2006 3:17PM
Actually, it isn't always a issue. I have a friend who is Australian and seems to go well with the American servers.
Basically, it depends on the server, and maintainance time isn't always an issue...
Sylythn Aug 28th 2006 11:46AM
I wonder - is the reason for lumping the Australians in with the US because of language considerations? I would think they'd get better stability, response time and player availability if they were tied in to the Asian server clusters.
On the bright side, this bodes well for me when I go to Hong Kong for 6 weeks soon...if Australians don't have issues with packet delay going all the way from Australia to the US and back, I should still be able to play on my US servers while away.
Lightassassin Aug 28th 2006 9:43PM
I'm an Australian playing on the US servers. The servers set to our time are pointless, it only effects in game time (day or night).
It's true about maintenance kicking in during playing time... makes few a good amount of time lost, so you just head to bed early (or watch tv, heck you're playing a computer game haha).
I play on bloodscalp along with my friends and brothers, this at least gives us some people to work with. There are a few aussie raid guilds on each server, we'd love our own servers and a few groups have been pushing for them. We'll never see them... we just get time zoned servers instead :(
LnD Aug 29th 2006 2:57AM
i play on jubei'thos alliance side, and the lag, 600 man queues and random dc's are a joke.... sometimes you spend 1 hour just to get in... what really sucks is our main tank for the guild gets dc'd sometimes becuase he hasnt got the best of connections and if he gets put into a queue GG we have to wait 1 hour before we can do anything else... unless we are doing mc or bwl... but its just a joke... espically the best latency you can get on the servers are 400 but lately my guildmates and i have gotten around 1000+ latency which tottaly sucks when trying to kill stuff
BloodNova Aug 29th 2006 6:57PM
as an aussie player, i do have to admit, life kinda sux....
server shutdown (when there is no extended maintance) is 10pm tuesday night... not fun!
average ping is ~300ms and if u get under 250ms your considered a god.
major lag spikes occur frequently, and have lasted up to 37mins in which NOTHING is possible.
on the plus side tho, none of the oceanic servers seem to have to undergo the hardware retrofitting upgrades that cause major problems for some of the US servers.
and the main problem with pings is not actually blizzards fault (for us)
between australia and the western coast of the US exists the PacificFibreLink (terminating in sydney, where i reside), a fire optic link with bandwith and ping times that would be more than suited for blizzards need.
the problem? Australian IP's and most importantly, Telstra (owner of the Link) (also known to many as Hellstra) if you think blizzard server managment is bad, youd commit suicide if you ever saw the managment of the telstra servers....
and as there is only a single link between US and Aus, ALL the data from around australia has to bounce to sydney before finally being sent back to the US.
If you live in perth (and alot of my guildies do) this can make the problem much worse...
David Hill Aug 30th 2006 12:50AM
New Zealand is in the same boat as Australia, I use the Kazagroth server and usually get 600ms. Every 10 mins or so that spikes to 2100ms before coming back to 500ms. I created a character on the Whisperwind server and have been green ever since.
Daniel Oct 3rd 2006 5:40AM
Theres at least 3 MAIN cable links that aust uses, plus ya satalite bandwidth as well, there is no real problem with these links(except Satalites Very High latency), and depending where and how your isp routes traffic, depends which you one you end up using...and they don't all depart from sydney.
The real issue of ping times is just plain old distance, you could have fibre direct from your house to the US servers and you will still get higher pings than the US players.
Lately theres alot of serverside latency issues imo.
Maintainance time is an issue for me since it smack bang right in the middle of peak time, but I guess you just work around it.