Hello there.
I have played Overwatch since eichenwalde was released and man do I love this game, it’s something that I would wake up everyday and look forward to booting up however since late last year a change has been made to the servers I play on and it has unequivocally ruined my enjoyment of Overwatch to the point where I don’t bother to boot it up anymore.
What is this problem you ask? Well I play Overwatch all the way from South Africa, it used to be that we were matchmade onto EU servers where we had a constant ping of around 190 (this isnt that bad for us) however late last year servers seemingly in the middle east were made and now we are force matchmade onto these servers without choice, sure we now have a ping of 140 (an irrelevant difference) but now all facets of the game I enjoy are dead. I can sit in a queue for over and hour and not find a game of mystery heroes which was my favourite pass time. Quick play games also have ridiculous queues and the best part is that when I get a game all my team mates are level 10 while my enemies are level 300 and something. Not to mention language barriers, here in South Africa we primarily use English especially online but now I’ve gone weeks at a time with no team mate who can understand me.
I know this is a long rant but its really gotten under my skin, I’m not asking for much, just the ability to choose which server region I want to connect to, I shouldn’t have to use a VPN in order to play a game of mystery heroes. It’s crazy.
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I think this is just another “unlucky” sadly.
There are only 3 servers (Paris, Amsterdam & ME) on the EU region and it will always default you to the one with the lowest ping.
I’d suggest stacking with people who are in mainland Europe. If you are the only South Africa located player in the lobby, the chances of you getting placed on the ME server are almost zero.
Thats the problem, all my friends i play with are also South African, its a real nightmare
I get your pain, I had 3 friends in SA that I played with and they have moved on to pastures new.
But the times they have come on, I have made them stack with friends I have in England and we’ve been on the Paris server 99% of the time.
It’s really not and responses like this only give Blizzard the green light to continue this.
We’re talking about a multi-million dollar company. They can and should afford to build more server centers around the world so people don’t have to face these issues. A couple server centers in Africa, ME, EU, etc won’t break the bank and with the amount of effort they’re putting in to OW2, it’s definitely something we should be encouraging them to do, instead of saying oh well, that’s just life, stack up with others instead.
I play on a constant 35 ping every day here in west coast NA, but I feel the pain of my fellow gamers around the world like the OP.
If the traffic was there to justify it, I am totally sure they would.
They probably run servers at a certain average capacity, for efficiency reasons. Adding more would just thin the players out probably increase que times even more significantly.
They added more. There was 1 or 2 added in America, one in Asia and EU got the ME server added. So they are adding them. But I imagine it it a pretty huge cost outlay. So if player numbers with OW2 spike massively, I’m sure they’ll add it.
And I suspect the ping normalisation they’ve been testing and going to use in OWL next season might see its way to the live game, if really successful. That way, doesn’t matter where you are, the system levels the ping out a bit.
And you are right, Activision-Blizzard are a multi billion dollar set of companies. And the last 2 years had record profits. But Blizzard were told that record wasn’t enough and had to cut costs (a lot of staff got cut/moved elsewhere). Probably another reason why something like this won’t see any change for awhile.
the biggest problem for playing on Eu are the russians, dont speak english or understand if they are going on voice only russian no one can understand. Every time russians… We got a problem in wow with them as well, they get own server sweet only a few remain but this is just ohhhhh.
Russian is the most commonly spoken language in Europe.
You are bound to play with a Russian speaker from time to time. They still play the game like everyone else.
You don’t have to be in voice, so I am not sure how the language someone is comfortable speak is an issue.
It really shouldn’t even be an issue. Latency is the only issue. If someone complains that they’re playing with Russians or Arabs and there’s language problems, well, tough, welcome to planet earth. Sometimes we will game with non English speakers and that’s just the way it is. But when a player in Africa has no choice but to either play on 190ping EU servers or 140ping ME servers, then that’s a problem imo, hence why I say they should create more server centres, like one around south Africa and one up north. It would make gaming for them so much better, across all of Blizzard’s games.
I actually wish I had the diversity that you Europeans have in games. Here in NA I almost always only ever play with Americans, which is fine because at least we speak English, but every now and then I get some Aussies playing in games using a VPN, or Indians, or Europeans, and it’s nice. I grew up in the UK so I’m used to diversity and prefer it over living around or gaming with just one nationality.
I agree ping is the only really issue here.
I’d love it if they just spend hundreds of millions of dollars to set up loads of regionalised servers so everyone could be on as low ping as possible. But Activision is in control of budgets… so any expansion is unlikely, unless they know they can make a lot more money doing it.
I agree. As much as I enjoy playing on NA from time to time. You just doing get quite the same level of weird and hilarious interactions as you do on EU.