Overwatch Is Starting To Improve Ping Times For Australians

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.


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