While people have been happy to froth and fawn over Overwatch, there’s been one glaring issue for Australians and New Zealanders playing in the beta of Blizzard’s inaugural shooter: lag.
When you’re playing from our fine shores on servers located in North America, pings can get pretty high. But Blizzard has been steadily working on improving that experience, and players in Australia and New Zealand are specifically benefiting.
The issue of local servers and the game’s network performance for Australians was indirectly mentioned in the latest developer update from Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan, who said players in Australia, South America and North America would have been enjoying improved ping times.
The catch is that to get those improved ping times, players down under have been getting longer queue times while matchmaking. Any hardcore FPS fan will probably tell you that they’d take that over getting into a match with a worse experience.
Kaplan also talked a little about the complexities of the matchmaking process and some of the frustrations players have. He also apologised at the end that Overwatch wasn’t capable of supporting more players in the beta than it currently does; if more people were added, he argued, Overwatch’s systems might have difficulty delivering an enjoyable experience for the vastly increased player count.
Comments
6 responses to “Overwatch Is Starting To Improve Ping Times For Australians”
Matchmaking, not being free to play and the way xp works… I keep hearing lame compromises making me not want to buy this game. I would love to try the beta to see if its really worth it.
The game is pay once, get all future content free, (which is better than f2p in that you won’t be hit with either grinds for future content or microtransactions), the progression system/xp is fine and unobtrusive.
The gameplay is fantastic. After getting into beta and playing a lot since, I put my preorder in.
Not had many issues with lag myself while playing on us servers, about the same as Wow, but the game plays fantastic on it, while I cannot stand anything over 100 on something like TF 2 Overwatch feels good at double that.
Long queue times solution – let more Aussie players into the beta! I guess I’ll take a bullet and play for the greater good 😛
They need more aus servers either way. Even with the longer queue times, I end up on US servers a fair bit.
This sort of thing wouldn’t be an issue if they could unclench their ass-cheeks to extract that rod up there and actually allow users to host their own servers, a la TF2. What the hell has got into multiplayer games these days where they demand that they be the only ones to host their own shitty servers which the game won’t run without once they stop supporting the service a few years later?
The host of peer to peer “servers”/”matches” can simply disconnect any IP connected to them any time they wish, among other ways of ruining the game for everyone.
Now all they need to do is up the tickrate…
Why are they catering to people with dial-up in an FPS ffs?