blog Those of you who’ve been long-term fans of the excellent video games produced by Blizzard Entertainment (StarCraft, World of Warcraft, Diablo) will recall that Australians have been fighting for many years to get the company to set up local servers to service the multi-player aspects of its games. Delimiter last wrote about the issue back in October 2010, when the gaming giant labelled Telstra as the biggest roadblock in the way to the infrastructure being set up locally. Well, Blizzard has finally cracked, and Diablo III is the first cab off the rank to get the local seal of approval. Ausgamers relays the following statement from Blizzard (we recommend you click here for the full article):
“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.”
We can’t help but suspect that the move has something to do with the fact that Amazon Web Services now has an Australian datacentre, also located in Sydney. Blizzard has consistently stated that investing in Australian servers would be a major infrastructure investment which wasn’t justified. But the deployment of Amazon’s commodity cloud service in Australia may have given Blizzard more options, given how standardised the service now is globally. But that’s just our suspicion — we don’t have any evidence about that at all.
Image credit: Blizzard
I went to check my ping the other day and nearly fell off my chair! Sub 100ms in Perth is just brilliant. 250 – 350ms pings were quite brutal before. I may even consider a Hardcore character now.
My only hope is that they conduct maintenance in times more friendly to Australians, however considering it’s tied to the US infrastructure I’m not holding my breath.
Always a disadvantage playing online games from Perth :P
Maybe this new big underwater fiber cable from Perth to Singapore will make it a bit better :)
Well, yeah for MMO’s generally. SEA servers as mentioned seem fine for competitive gaming (Titanfall).
Luckily Perth still gets plenty of love from 3FL / Internode and the like with dedicated servers for all our other online needs.
Console gaming has historically been a bit rough so I’m interested in seeing if things like Microsoft’s Azure servers change the game for the west.
Too late for some… I’ve moved on from Blizzard’s games. Cancelled my Warcrack subscription nearly a year ago, and haven’t played Diablo3 for at least 6 months (neither is even installed on my current gaming PC).
But for those who enjoy the clickfests, good luck to you. Lag death was a real annoyance in D3.
I stopped playing D3 probably around 6 months ago. They’ve made a signification improvement in patch 2.0.1, so much so that I changed my mind about getting the expansion.
You are right the improvements they have made to the game has enticed me to play again. It is no longer required to farm the AH since it has been removed and the loot changes they have made are fantastic. Since I started playing I have dropped 5 legendaries and 2 set pieces in two weeks of casual play.
Before that I had dropped only two legendaries and both were horrible. It is worth looking into again if you lie hack and slash.
Got sick of diablo 3 when it became obvious that it was tweaked towards forcing pay-to-win. Tried to go back for a run a couple of months ago, and my account had been hijacked. Awesome.
Started to look into reclaiming my account, but Blizzard wanted things like scans of my passport etc. Well, if they can’t keep an account safe (and the authenticators they sell are an admission of that) then they can’t keep copies of my passport safe either. It was a gobsmacking request on their behalf.
So their refusal to support Australia, their deliberately manipulative-via-frustration game design and their mind-boggling approach to security has lead me to say “F*** you, Blizzard”
All the “pay-to-win” elements have been removed in the last month. Both Auction Houses are gone.
That’s good. For a lot of people, myself included, this does nothing to restore the goodwill that Blizzard destroyed.
Maliciously defecating on customers is not magically forgiven by those customers when a company stops maliciously defecating on them. Nor is it magically forgotten.
This is a shame, as several years ago I held Blizzard in similar esteem to Valve for the quality of their game making.
The irony for me is that all the “problems” with D3 are because they are features the public asked for. D2, people hated switching between toons between offline and online games, and having to maintain them totally separately.
So they morphed both the offline and online modes into one, and the only way to do that without worrying about hacking was through online storage.
In D2 there was a massive trading community, that was cumbersome and unwiledly. Players wanted a central location, and players wanted to be able ot make real money. Blizzard complied.
Fast forward to the release, players whing about getting what they asked for. It was a no win situation. They keep the offline and online modes separate, its drama. Give no auction house, its still drama. At least they tried something, just a shame it backfired.
Blizzard did indeed give lip service to the idea of giving people what they wanted. Enough to convince some people – those who really wanted to believe.
Sadly, what actually seems to have happened, was that Blizzard saw that there was all of these transactions happening which they weren’t profiting from. So they provided an ‘Auction House’ where they got a cut of every sale, They then tried to force people to use it by applying frustrating game development and a pay-to-win model.
The problem want the auction house, it was balancing the game and drop rates to take trading into account.
If they just had bind on account for legendary items, then people would have farmed for those and auction housed only for the basics.
Instead blizzard left it in the worst state: bad loot drops, incredibly difficult game, and full auction house trading.
I played my main character for 200 hours, (all up 400 hours) and never once found an upgrade to allow me to progress past inferno 1, I gamed the auction house to get to about inferno 3 or 4 but never found a single item that was better than what I had gotten (for cheap! I’m talking no single item costing more than 200k gold).
Also: Not one single item dropped was an upgrade for any of my three characters.
I could have played the market more heavily, bought low sold high but that wasn’t my game. I enjoyed my time farming, but it turned into a gold farming game, to then turn around and try to upgrade on the AH.
Diablo 3 2.0 has been leagues ahead. Many drops worth upgrading even before RoS.
AND 80ms ping – I had noticed that I was able to teleport out of danger, it was amazing how much better it felt.
Sadly my D3 install defaulted to the Europe server and I never thought to change it. This redirection to the Aussie server seems to be for those hitting the American server only. Bummer.
Contact support, I think you can get your account moved. Some retailers in Australia sold the incorrect version. Mine was a EU version, but I changed it to the US to match my friends, however the pain I went through patching every time was something else (it was eventually fixed properly without hacking ini files).
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