Australian Diablo III players are reporting pings as low as 33ms.
Update: A blue posted on the battle.net forums has confirmed the servers, stating “Blizzard Entertainment is pleased to announce the deployment of local Diablo III game servers for Australia and New Zealand to coincide with the launch of Diablo III: Reaper of Soul on March 25, 2014.”
Original Story: Numerous reports are coming in from Australian gamers being greeted with a nice little surprise upon logging in to Diablo III today. Noticing the game running shockingly smooth, players have hovered their cursors over their latency bars to discover not the 150-200ms they are used to, but rather, pings in the low 50ms range as their North American brethren experience. It would seem that Blizzard has added Australian, or at least, Oceanic, servers to the game, though there has been no official announcement.
IP sleuths have pinpointed the source of these new servers to a company called Equinix, which is based in Sydney. A Blizzard blue poster reportedly said “I’ll be posting up specifics on when servers unlock in ANZ later this week, so watch this space,” in this thread, but the post seems to have been deleted.
Either way, so many reports are coming in, and the reported pings are so low, that it seems pretty obvious that the server is real. Here’s hoping it’s not just a test, and something that will become permanent for everyone pretty soon, as Oceanic servers are something Australian and New Zealand gamers have been asking for for a long time.
We’ve reached out to Blizzard for an official comment on the servers, and will update this article as we get more information.
First Titanfall now Diablo? It looks like game developers in the US are finally learning that trying to play an online game with over 200 ping really, really sucks. Good news for those of you down-under!
Sources: Battle.net, games.on.net
