Almost two years after its release, Blizzard has announced that Diablo III will be getting local servers here in Australia.
“We’ve listened to community feedback and set a goal of improving the game experience for Diablo players in Australia and New Zealand,” said Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. “By deploying local game servers to the region in time for the release of Reaper of Souls, we aim to make slaying demons more fun—for the heroes, at least. Malthael’s in for a world of hurt.”
The servers were put in place in preparation for the release of Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, which is released 25 March. They are available now and are being hosted in a data centre located in Sydney.
Does this mean Blizzard is committing to local servers for all its titles? Not exactly, but Blizzard did state the following.
“Blizzard Entertainment is committed to providing our players around the world with the best possible experiences,” claimed Blizzard. “We will continue to explore optimal server solutions for all of our franchises in each region.”
Comments
61 responses to “Australia Now Has Local Servers For Diablo III”
Looks like I can finally run a hardcore character.
I’ve been playing hardcore on and off since release, never had a character die on me. Guess I just like to play it safe.
(I live in Melbourne btw)
I havent died to lag, but theres been a few instances where the pings gone terrible. Another friend has apparently died always to large lag spikes, but Im not 100% sure its the servers fault (ie: could just be things on his end sucks).
im not sure if its latency related but my hardcore witchdoctor died(well died twice with the passive) also used a health pot and everything, them walls elites cast well i got one casted inside me and i couldnt move for like 15 seconds cause it was stuck inside me, that didnt kill me though it was the 3 pink lasers and 15 mobs beating on me. How is that fair? its impossible, if they cast it in you then you are screwed and there is nothing u can do…. major bug.
Except that the witchdoctor has abilities that let you walk through those walls and break free from all of that stuff…
I used those abilities and it didn’t work it locked me inside the wall still.
I jumped on on Wednesday night before the announcement and the sub 50ms pings in game were amazing.
Local servers + Loot 2.0 + Adventure mode (When ROS launches) is going to make D3 feel like a brand new game.
Just a shame it’s taken almost 2 years to bring servers to ANZ.
First EA and now Blizzard?
I’m scared guys…
23ms pings in D3… so happy… this is as good as an offline mode for me
↑ This. Very enjoyable to play without the usual lag.
Two thumbs up for Blizzard finally supporting the Oceanic region a little.
You still have to put up with Tuesdays though, which depending on how ADDICTED YOU ARE RIGHT THEN can be an issue.
Wait a second, the expansion comes out on Tuesday. This is going to be awful!
OMG. I just had a nerdgasm.
I’m guessing there is no way to transfer old characters though.
Crap, I didn’t think of this… I guess that will mean starting fresh? Might not be a bad thing.
If your characters are in the US realm, they are all available
This is great then! Lower ping, no downsides. GG Bliz.
Kind of a bummer if you’ve been using characters on the Asia region (since from Perth they pinged slightly better). I’ve got characters in every class near max level, and with no means of transferring characters I other have to suck it up and continue playing with 350ms ping or start characters all over again. :/
You could try asking them. I’m not sure what they’re like with requests like that, but it’s worth a try.
If you have a fiend that is ok geared make a level 1 play it on t6 invite friend it took me 45min to level a friend to 60
Yeah, sub 30ms pings was awesome last night!!!
What’s happening with character transfers? @krisx, @trjn?
All my characters were there and available to play
I honestly didnt know I was on the AU server until I became suspicious of the lack of lag
That’s good news indeed. They must have ported them automatically or it just gets routed based on IPs.
My understanding is it still counts you as being part of the US realm, but it plays your game from the closest server.
You just play on The Americas region since that’s where they placed the servers, no character xfer needed if you already played there etc.
no need to transfer… its kind of confusing… you still select the American server… so you can still play with ppl from the US, keep your characters, whatever you want… through the magic of the internet you’ll actually be playing on an Australian server though… i played this morning (solo) and it was fantastic
@miketarno @bangers
Servers have been rock solid and pings in the 30ms range.
Between this and Titanfall gaining local servers, it has been a COMPLETE turn around for a lot of games. Loving the trend!
I can’t like this enough. If we can’t have offline play, this works for me!
Dont think of it as a server move, think of it as server load balancing
We are balanced over to the AU server as it is our fastest connection
This may be a stupid question (almost definately is a stupid question) but would this be for PC and 360?
considering 360 has offline mode i’d say probably not… but i’d say matchmaking/online works quite differently on console
People are still playing it? It seems that is the case, or the new update brought improvements that should have been standard in the game from release?
The second bit. 🙂
According to a lot of people loot 2.0 and other changes have made things a fair bit better and yes definitely should have been like that from the start,
I had a brief play the other day and you could definitely feel a difference. Want to get back into it this weekend and see how it goes.
With all these announcements, it might be the right time to metaphorically dust off the old D3.
Observation…..
I find it very interesting that the improved service (giving us a local server) has generated more positive reflections upon Blizzard than the release of RoS has.
I would like to hope that more companies take note of this.
Good service will, or improved service, quite often, does more for you than pumping out titles with (perceived) poor service
It’s just different from how companies usually treat the Oceanic region. Yes, we are by far one of the smaller demographics and shoved down in the middle of nowhere, but we appreciate good service as well as the next guy. 2 years coming regardless, a server for Australia is a big thing.
Think about it. We are subject to filtered content (ratings board), overpriced content (Australian price differences) and on top of this most largescale games are hosted overseas so we get laggy content too. Yet, we still buy and play the games obsessively, despite having to adapt to particular styles of play to compensate. Lag is a big downer for a lot of games (and in the case of hardcore/Inferno mode a death sentences in some cases), and the fact that we are finally getting a server of our own so we can enjoy the FULL content that we have payed for of course people are going to be ecstatic.
The more companies that do this will hopefully mean more will follow suit. I mean we got Free 2Play games here that have servers for us, why not more payed ones.
It sounds kinda odd to say “we’ve listened to community feedback” and implement a change that was requested two years ago…not the greatest turnaround.
Never the less, if this trend of Australian servers continues a hell of a lot of people are going to be happy.
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but the project lead changed at some point and things have dramatically improved. I just wish that whoever is running things now had been in charge five years ago.
Yeah, its been a huge improvement since Jay Wilson got taken off the project. It’s improved a lot since.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it was tied to AH. I’m not an accountant, but if the server, and by extension a part of the auction house (Or materials generated) were on Australia, would they have to pay local taxes? After all, if the item was digitally generated in Australia and sold for real dollars, is it an export?
I’ve got no clue, but that’s definitely an interesting point to consider.
Announcing a new feature just in time for the new paid expansion? Hmmm…
Very interesting idea. I hadn’t even thought of that.
What about World of Warcraft….
Maybe in time for WoD
Well that almost made me click on the client to get it to update. Almost.
Ok so you posted the same thing on the IGN article, and now Kotaku! We get it!!!
But I stopped playing Diablo 18 months ago. I may get the expansion if it has dramatically improved though. I wasn’t too fond of that Pythagoras’ update or whatever it was where you level up after max level and increase boosts by like 3% but at the sacrifice of it taking years to get even the first level.
The game has dramatically improved with the latest patch (basically the changes that RoS brings less the new modes, chapter and class).
That being said, there are some fundamental flaws with Diablo 3 that haven’t been addressed. The story is still completely terrible and ham-fistedly shoved down your throat at every opportunity (there is an option to auto-skip all cutscenes but there are still a lot of dialogue triggers to skip through).
The loot is much more interesting and you will find drops that encourage you to try entirely new builds but at the core, the items you want will need: main stat, vitality, crit chance, crit damage, attack speed (the trifecta) and all resistances.
Leveling up has been trivial. Admittedly there has been a 50% experience buff the last few weeks but the Paragon system really doesn’t take much. I’m paragon level 63 with four level 60 characters. A few weeks ago, my paragon level was single digits and I had only two level 60 characters. I did not make any concerted effort to grind up, my natural play since the patch got me all of those levels.
Not only that, while playing I was constantly finding upgrades to all of my gear.
It’s worth a look in depending on what you felt was wrong with the game. I can definitely understand if you still aren’t happy after playing with the changes but there’s a non-zero chance you’ll enjoy things now.
EDIT: Skills have also been completely rebalanced. Some of the changes are pretty rad, like monks having mobility and having abilities that don’t use spirit (which monks never seem to have while out of combat).
agreed. I recently started playing again after an 18 month hiatus and I have to say the game has improved dramatically. the storyline is definitely still woeful and the core mechanics are still a little flawed but the loot system is now actually EXCITING, and functioning very smoothly. Legendaries now actually have some use, along with having significant stat boots they have interesting unique properties. For example –
– Chance on hit, summons a demon slave
– Every time you use War Cry, you and all allies within 50 yards receive a 30% speed boost for 10 seconds
– Chance on hit, draws in enemies (seems to be about 25-30 yards) to the enemy you’re striking and reduces movement speed by 80%
It’s properties like this that are reinvigorating the game, and if they can get the story back on track (doubtable) RoS might actually be a really fun release.
Found one that spawns an enemy champion upon activating a shrine. Such a great farming tool.
that is pretty badass.
Waaaaaaay to late.
If they had really listened to community feedback then there would be an offline singleplayer mode
Local servers almost makes up for that though.
If due to the local servers there is no issue with lag an offline mode becomes a lot more irrelevant.
Not useful for people with no internet though.
WoW servers for Warlords of Draenor ples!
I stopped playing due to the lag I had on the servers (260ms+ in a private game). i fired it up last night, got like a maximum of 75ms and had a great time. I’ve gone from not wanting anything to do with Diablo 3 to possibly getting the expansion next week.
As a WoW player I hope the Blizzard uses this as a chance to see if local WoW servers can be done.
does this mean we loose all out characters if we created them on other servers?
just checking – you cant move characters to new regions right? if i want to play on these servers it will be a new region and i will have to start again?
Australian server is part of american group. If you’re using a proxy/vpn program to appear as if you’re US, you’ll have a bad time. But your US characters will be visible on the Aussie servers. You can see US friends. IF US friends starts a game, the game will be hosted on US server and you will get US latency. If you host the game, your US friend gets the latency.
ok cool. i play the solo campaign more (and will restart with the crusader as a char) so i dont think this affects me much
No offline, no LAN, no $ from me. Same as it ever was.
Still the same Tuesday 8pm (AEST) maintenance blues though. I guess you can’t have everything!