National broadband player Internode has discussed the need for an Australian World of Warcraft server with iconic game publisher Blizzard “for many years”, the company’s managing director Simon Hackett said today.

The debate about the need for a WoW server located in Australia received a new lease of life earlier this month, with World of Warcraft production director J. Allen Brack reportedly saying it was an issue Blizzard discussed internally on a regular basis.

The lack of servers hosted in Australia for the game — also a common problem with a number of other online offerings — means that local players must connect to international servers and suffer extended latency compared with players in those countries, which can disadvantage them in-game and cause slower online reaction times.

“We have held talks with Blizzard about this issue for many years. We continue to engage with them on it,” said Hackett in an emailed statement this morning on the issue. “As we run a major Australian national gaming network, we know how passionate WoW players are about the lack of WoW servers here. And we would like nothing more to be a part of the solution.”

Internode runs the games.on.net service which hosts a number of dedicated online servers for Australian gamers for popular games like Team Fortress 2.

Brack had said the issue was a question of local timing and expenditure.

“It has always come down to business case for Blizzard, and I’m sure that’s still the issue — that passion for having a local server cluster is one thing, but they’re expensive, and Blizzard has not to date been able to make the business case for the expenditure stack up, despite the passion,” said Hackett.

“We remain hugely keen to be a part of that solution (including with the provision of data centre facilities and with the use of our national and international network links), but ultimately it’s still up to Blizzard.”

Blizzard has set up ‘Oceania’ WoW servers that target Australian WoW players with local time zones, but the servers are still based overseas.

Image credit: Blizzard

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1. Jason
   Posted 27/10/2010 at 7:54 pm | Permalink | Reply

   So enough people look up porn each day, will Internode host a porn server?

   Really, care factor 0 of this news.

2. Matthew
   Posted 02/11/2010 at 11:45 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Quote “Blizzard has set up ‘Oceania’ WoW servers that target Australian WoW players with local time zones, but the servers are still based overseas.”

   Yeah however these severs are not maintained to suit Australian or at that fact any Oceania country, we also ways have to endure the weekly maintenance during our peak game time where with US players they have the maintenance carried out 5-11am there time. Which as a player point of view can make a real difference.

3. Dazz
   Posted 17/11/2010 at 6:48 am | Permalink | Reply

   only prob is, even if we do have a dedicated server based in Australia, there will still be the lat issues between players due to the Aus and US servers having to communicate for x-realm interaction.