Hello there!
I’ve been playing Overwatch since beta and I really enjoy playing competitive whenever I’m not playing with friends. I’m from Qatar (a small country in the Middle East) and therefore have been playing on the “Europe” region on the launcher since the start. Now that we have the new Middle Eastern servers, my ability to playing competitive/ranked matches is really hindered. The issues that I and many others currently face is the lack of players connected to the middle eastern servers and others that I will be listing.
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Competitive play: As a 3800-4000 SR support main. It’s been tough trying to queue for competitive matches. I’ve had several discussions with local friends that are in grandmaster/top 500 and they get matched with diamond/platinum players and more often than not encounter leavers. This is one of the main reasons I’ve avoided queuing for competitive on the middle eastern servers. Therefore I have started playing on the “Americas” region on the launcher which usually places me in matches that are in South Asia which have players that speak English and understand how the game needs to be played. When I am in said South Asian servers, my ping is usually 90-100 which is completely fine and doesn’t hinder my ability to play the game at all, since I am used to playing in EU with 120-130 ping. However on the south Asian servers, I’m assuming because of my location, whenever I queue for competitive play it takes more than 20 minutes to get me into a game, sometimes even longer. The other day it took me more than 50 minutes and by that time I just quit.
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Leavers & Language: In most games on the middle eastern servers I’ve had leavers on my team and the enemy team, people just seem to not care about games and leave whenever they feel like it or if they die/get tilted. Be that in quick play or whatever game mode. The amount of leavers I encountered have been 10 times the amount of leavers I encountered back before the middle eastern servers were installed. Also, most players speak Arabic and only Arabic. If you try to speak English you get flamed and mocked for some reason? As a native Arabic speaker I have no issue with the language, it’s just that I prefer speaking English whenever I am online and feel more comfortable doing so. And there is lack of communication when it comes to voice chat anyways.
What I’m asking for is a way to separate European servers and Middle Eastern servers. Or any way for players to choose which servers they get to connect to. I would much rather have high SR and shorter queue time competitive games with 120 ping than having 20 ping and being on the middle eastern servers. Please blizzard if there is ANYTHING you can do to help, that would be amazing. Just a simple way to choose which servers to connect to would be perfect. I really hope an Overwatch team member sees this post and I thank you all for your hard work making this game an amazing experience for us.