According to a thread recently posted on Blizzard’s forum page, a large number of players seem to be having issues with Australians servers on Overwatch.
Many in the thread, which is over 400 comments deep, claim they are being re-routed to United States servers, meaning their ping is leaping from 20-40ms to 150-200ms. A sizeable difference and, to most, borderline unplayable.
According to many, these issues have been exacerbated since the weekend. The above thread started almost two weeks ago, June 12. So far Blizzard has yet to officially comment and, as a result, some players are discussing refunds under Australian Consumer Law.
Worth noting: we checked the game from our office. We were able to get a game on local servers with ping of 2ms. It could be an ISP issue. This has happened in the past. Optus users had issues with Starcraft 2. One user noted he was getting low pings using Vodafone, but struggling with Optus.
But servers seem to have been inconsistent for most. We’ve reached out to Blizzard Australia locally, who have forwarded a note overseas. If we hear anything back we’ll update.
Comments
34 responses to “Some People Are Having Issues With Overwatch’s Australian Servers”
Anyone getting 200ms to the US is laughing. We used to have to play the best HL1/HL2 mods at 300+ just to get a look-in.
Natural Selection 1 as a Skulk on US servers required true determination.
NS YESSSSSSSS. This was the main reason I played at 300-350, too.
Shame about GameArena shutting down.
I used to Q3A with 400ms…
Non-full TF2 servers used to be that way, too, for a few years. Used to be that only on.net, gamearena, and a couple other regulars would actually host anything in Oz, and the rest was private/passworded, full, or on goofy-as-fuck custom map rotations (eg: achievement-hunting maps).
In Gears of War 1 and 2, Australian players had to be content with never using the Torque Bow. Considering if they fire a shot and walked forward, they would shoot themselves in the back of the head.
Pretty much this, I routinely play Overwatch with US friends and have a 200ms or so ping… It’s actually very playable.
I play using a Telstra Cable line, and have also noticed some odd things happening with the servers over the weekend. A couple of times I was stuck in some US servers with noticeable lag.
They also talk a lot more rubbish in those servers.
gg 2 ez amirite?
Exactly this
I’m on Telstra cable too and haven’t been able to get into a local server since Friday. With the small time to kill in overwatch its unplayable at 200+ ping imo. If we could get an official response it would ease my concerns a bit. Otherwise i guess il try get a refund.
Myself and a friend were playing from 12am-3am. He had experienced 180ms+ ping earlier in the day, but at around 2am we were being connected to Australian servers again. Not the first time the aussie servers have had issues since release.
All in all it’s not unplayable at least. An official comment would be great though. With Overwatch’s generous hitboxes and net code it doesn’t seem to make a HUGE difference, though it is noticeable. Didn’t stop us playing it – hell, that used to be the norm for some online games back in the day. Even WoW’s Oceanic servers didn’t start off as actual oceanic servers, merely US servers with a different timezone – it’s the sort of delay you can eventually get accustomed to though it’s certainly rad to have a low ping.
I would appreciate the option to restrict the game to oceanic servers only rather than being rerouted, though I believe this was an issue where the oceanic servers were all down or shaky, as it has been a recurring issue for a few days now.
Yeah, its weird.. If I’m on the American servers with around 200ms its pretty playable. But when my housemates are using the internet and causes the ping to hover around that 200ms+/- on an australian server, it does become noticeable.
I agree thou, the option to only play local servers would be nice. Hopefully they will chuck up some more servers or give players to options to play local only when competitive drops.
No issues when I was playing earlier today but have been getting 200-300ms a lot over the weekend.
If you google hard enough there is a command which forces overwatch to join AU servers only 🙂
If you google even harder you’ll notice that it doesnt fix the issue.
That command line trick doesn’t work, I believe Blizzard stated something to that effect.
And yep, I’ve been having major issues with getting a connection to an Aussie server too, it wouldn’t be so annoying if you could tell what server it had logged you into before the game has started. I’ve been loading up a game to hero select, checking ping, quitting to desktop, relogging over and over until I get an Aussie server. Infuriating.
I had the same problem too
Oh thank god this isn’t just me. Was getting stuck in 150-200ms games this weekend, until I grouped with someone else in Sydney and then got a 5ms game. Once we un-grouped, I was back to 150ms, so thought I was being getting redirected to servers elsewhere.
Good to know it’s not an issue with my system, but hopefully something Blizz will fix quickly!
I had an issue with this when I was still playing a few weeks ago, every now and then I would end up on an American server with 250ms.
On the plus side either americans are terrible at shooters or the “favour the shooter” system that blizzard used allowed me to get some very high kill streaks.
I find it strange that they don’t note which server you are on like they do with HOTS. Top right corner of HOTS tells you FPS, Ping, Memory use and server.
Yeah, I only noticed because of my really bad ping.
Once I got moved to the US servers I would pretty much stay there and nothing short of quitting and restarting would fix it.
Thanks for posting this Kotaku, We might now get a response from Blizz. I’ve been posting about this on reddit and the official forums since launch and still waiting for Blizz to comment on it.
When trying to play at peak times (mainly weekends) its almost impossible to get put onto an AUS server. I go from 50ms to 230ms and its very noticeable. The fact that it happens at peak time and to alot of people suggests that Blizz just don’t have enough servers here to handle the amount of players. People on reddit say things like “oh common be grateful you get servers at all” “Back in my day 230ms would be a DREAM” makes me sad.
With competitive mode coming out soon this needs to be fixed. Either give us more servers or put an option in the game to let me decide if I wasn’t to wait for a spot or play on US servers.
Oh yeh forgot about competitive mode. If they haven’t fixed this by then I’ll be banned within a day 😛
I played a little bit on Sunday afternoon and didn’t notice much lag, I did notice though there was no music in any of the menu’s or during gameplay (I just heard more footsteps and got a couple of extra eliminations as a result 😉 )
Yeah I had that, also no ulti callouts 🙁
But kept on getting DC’d anyway.
Noticed it yesterday. I had the performance option ticked in the settings so I can see my ping in game. Joined 2 US server out of around 10-15 games.
500ms+ ping on naked iinet less than 200m from the exchange. When the servers want to play nice, it’s awesome. When they don’t, I’m worried I’ll get a shitty rep because I keep having to leave half way through when my connection crawls to a halt.
I just get constant RTT spikes and rubberbanding. Tried every solution the internet can offer and no improvement – have to assume the problem is on Blizz’s end.
Count me in on the having issues staying on local servers. I’m on iinet NBN and regularly get moved to US servers, ping goin from 14ms to 180ms plus. It makes playing anything other than Reinhardt almost impossible.
I would notice that I would get put on to a is server after a match were the losing team would bail and then the Matchmaker would fail to fill the group. Then I would get a message saying unable to fill group, switching servers. Then BAM US servers. Trying to play from rural Victoria on US servers is like trying to achieve orbit using a bucket and a match.
Haha even Overwatch recent server issues overshadow Battleborns lag woes and that has had issues since launch………If people are talking about refunds after two weeks of issues in regards to Overwatch, imagine what the poor bastards are dealing with playing Battleborn…………finally a comparison worth mentioning between the two games
Resetting Winsock took my game from unplayable to solid 35 ping. I don’t really know what resetting Winsock does, but it’s just a matter of opening an administrator command prompt and typing “netsh winsock reset”
Often will be put in American servers.
Telstra Cable here. Had nothing but US servers until I changed my DNS servers to the Google ones (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4). Now I’m consistently on Aus ones.
Presuming this is just the PC versions because the Xbone has been fine!
Wait, did i say fine? Apart from the constant “no team members”, “reinstancing, and “finding another game” issues.
They could learn a thing from Splatoon here.. getting into matchws and keep playing wqs far far smoother.
I play on Telstra Cable, my friend plays on fibre (not nbn) and my other friend plays on adsl2+. Over the weekend we experienced pings of between 198 – 205 ms. We each performed a traceroute and ping request to the Blizzard Americas stated ip of 37.244.0.3 and compared it to their other regions. The ping to the Americas server most closely resembled the ping we were experiencing. I also play BF4 and Arma 3, I routinely get pings of 180-270ms to United States servers when playing with friends overseas.
The fact that this has been happening every weekend since Overwatch released, is annoying me greatly. I’d be interested to hear what happens to the people looking to return their copies of Overwatch. I play mostly on the weekend and the migration to US servers is affecting me a lot because of that. Unlike other games like Arma 3, Overwatch is unplayable at a ping of 200ms.
Ahhh, this explains why I sucked yesterday… Clearly they must have had these issues since launch, and have only just discovered it now.
Optus cable. Played with an average of 500 ping, with the highest of 1000. Thanks Blizzard servers.