After 10 years, Australians will finally have locally hosted World of Warcraft servers.
It’s been a long, long time coming, but Australian World of Warcraft players will soon finally be able to play the game the way it’s meant to be played: free of lag. Tonight at a World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor pre-launch community event in Sydney, Blizzard announced that the current Oceanic realms (which are actually hosted in California at the moment) will be migrated to servers based in Australia.
The move to local hosting should significantly reduce lag for players in Australia and New Zealand. Just as an FYI, a “good” ping for Australians on the current Oceanic servers is around 150ms, with most people hovering between 150-300. The changeover will occur as a part of next week’s scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, October 28, local time. The Oceanic servers will be down for an extended window. When the servers come back online, they will be hosted in Australia.
As an added bonus, Australian World of Warcraft players who are currently playing on US realms will be offered a free character transfer to any of the Oceanic realms for a limited time.
Earlier in the year, we heard that Diablo III received Australian Servers, there have been Southeast Asian servers for Starcraft II ever since it first launched, and even the still-in-alpha Heroes of the Storm has local Australian servers. But until now, WoW players had been left behind.
It’s good to see Blizzard finally giving us what we’ve only been asking for for 10 years, and now, maybe Australians will actually be able to compete with Americans in high-level PVP and raids, since we will no longer have that massive lag disadvantage.
Source: Games.on.net
