So there’s a new Bahrain datacenter for Middle East, why is it not on a separated region like Americas and Asia? maybe It should be separated as a “Middle East Region” ? or maybe It should be in Asia? since Bahrain (and all the other Middle East Countries) are in fact located in Asia and not in Europe…
Now here’s my full story, for those who are interested or curious why im making this request:
I Live in Iran, which is a country in Middle East, I used to have a ping of 80-90 to Netherlands datacenter… (it was the closest datacenter to Iran) And i was totally happy with it too, since a constant ping around that number is playable and can be gotten used to…
Since they created the Bahrain servers, my game automatically connects to that server instead of Netherlands when I’m on Europe region, And I get a ping of 70-80 (Please, take note that the difference between my ping to Netherlands and to Bahrain is so minimal, only less than ~10 ms.)
Now i mean no offence to anyone but my gaming experience is completely ruined since this happened, In these servers since there are mostly people from Arabic countries, they speak Arabic in game chat and voice chat! And I do not understand a single word, since Arabic is not spoken where i live (I know Persian and English only…) And everytime I want to talk or coordinate with team (as I always did before) Either they cant understand my English or they just all talk in Arabic Even after I Beg them not to…
I understand that this datacenter is very useful for many people, even some people from Iran might be fine with this and want to continue playing here, specially if they know Arabic or the casual players that do not care about talking with anyone or coordinating, or using the voice chat, etc… But not everyone is the same in a country, I honestly could not play in those server because of language and culture differences that i had with most of the people and I had to switch my Region to Americas and I’ve been playing on those servers for past days with ~200 ping… (because at least I can easily coordinate with my team or talk with them in English…) But why does this have to happen? I could play on Netherlands server with much better ping and no issue. Now only to avoid confusion I have to play on much higher ping of 200 (more than twice as I had before.)
Please note that this doesn’t only affect my own experience but also for others, because I either get a high ping on Americas and would be slow while healing teammates no matter how hard i try, or I would constantly get into extremely toxic arguments with Arabic speaking people if i Play on Europe Region when It places me on the Bahrain datacenter.
As a Solution for this I wanted to ask Blizzard to Consider either separating the Middle East server from Europe, Having it in Asia instead, OR adding any option to manually set my default datacenter within a region, so that i can choose Netherlands datacenter over the Bahrain one. And not have to go to Americas, which is the other side of the world…
I hope I was able to explain my situation clearly enough.
Thanks in advance.
Edit:
I wish to add that the option to manually change the default datacenter is already available in some games… for example, In the Ubisoft game, Rainbowsix Siege, there is an option to change the datacenter from Default to either of the available servers, in the games settings .ini file in the Documents…
So its fair to assume that its possible to implement that option also in Overwatch.