No, Tobold. You missed the point of the thread.

I play on one of the affected servers (Aman'thul) and what we are experiencing is not simple latency. It is near nightly server lockups of anywhere from 10 seconds - 5 minutes in length, always occurring during server prime time (usually between 6-9:30 PM server), during which most servers on the entire battlegroup will crash, being down for up to 10 minutes and locking people out of instances for up to 30. Anywhere from 3-8 lockups occur per night, with 1-2 resulting in crashes, all over a 2-3 hour timespan -- virtually every night since the release of patch 2.4, which was approximately seven weeks ago.

The weekends are worse, with lockups starting earlier, ending later, lasting longer, and occuring more frequently.

These issues evidently affect a lot of non-oceanics as well, but as they always occur during our prime time (2-5 AM for Americans), they are not affected to nearly the same extenting as the Oceanic/Asian/Pacific playerbase is.

We have learned to deal with the 200-500 pings, but the server instability on Blizzard's end is what we find completely unacceptable.
 

I wonder if that is something universal (although perhaps on a smaller scale). The euro servers seem a lot less stable lately too.
 

I'm on an effected oceanic server as well. The problem seems to be getting worse with each patch.

They've been very slow to deal with the overcrowding as well but at least we can see some progress there. As far as lag goes it just gets worse.

Not much fun having maintenance occur during prime time hours either I must say.
 

Coming from an EU server to an Oceanic Server (Caelestrasz), the level of latency is atrocious. Very, very bad latency spikes, server crashes, disconnections and all in the prime time of Oceanic Servers - which just happens to be in the middle of the night for US players. So our issues happen when practically no one is playing at their time, and the technical support are all tucked up in bed.

Well maybe not quite, but sometimes it feels that way.

The other very grotesque situation is that in the one event where US players were affected by similar situations, the problems were resolved within a day and everyone affected were given a free day of play. Oceanic players have been living with their problems for over 7 weeks and its becoming more and more of a brick wall dealing with Customer/Tech Support.

AoC/WAR may not be a WoW Killer but crap service will definitely do that.
 

I like how Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation explained why Australia gets games so much later then the rest of the world.
 

I think i sent you the link Tobold in an effort to the problem heard.

It's not latency that's killing Oceanic players, it's the 30mins/1hr of lag and disconnects at 7:30-9:00pm that is killing raids.

Of course oceanic is a lot bigger than Australia, we have New Zealanders, Singaporeans, Indonesians, Taiwanese etc etc.

For a Customer Service Forum to hit 130+ pages with no fix after 6-7 weeks is abysmal. If your phone/cable/mobile/power company did this, you would be storming their HQ.

What gets up my nose is that because it's a video game, apparently customer service doesn't need to reflect that of another company earning billions in revenue.

And that is what offends most Oceanic people. We pay the same US$ as everyone else, why should we have to beg to get a problem addressed?
 

This had been happening on US servers as well, during the 2-5AM time frame mentioned above, starting with patch 2.4. I lost track of the number of times I died while lagged.

It seems to have been resolved, but it took a month or so. The question then is why it hasn't been fixed elsewhere.
 

I agree with Neil.
While us Aussies have bad latency to start with, the recent problems have nothing to do with that.

We have learnt to live with poor latency, constantly getting screwed over, PvP especially.
ie knowing you hit that last spell/move well before someone else, but the server decides that you didnt and you die.

Recent problems do not show up in latency.
It is just a server freeze. Looting corpse will take 5 minutes. Chat and other functions work and able to move around sometimes but looting, resurecting and killing mobs is impossible.
When half the guild gets kicked 3 times in half an hour a raid is impossible.

This issue has existed before the latest patch but it seems worse now. A lot of people on Whirlpool forums were adamant that the problems lay with Oz ISPs, however one ISP did a whole lot of work and identified the problem as Blizzards

We are a small fish in the pond in Australia, but we are people (and orcs/Tauren) too!
 

Thanks for giving this important issue more exposure Tobold!

I have been playing with Oceanic MMO enthusiasts for many years now. Back in EverQuest, our guild didn't have the server problems like we are experiencing now with WoW.

I believe what is happening is that Blizzard is performing background maintenance while the server is live. This usually happens from around 2 am - 5 am (Pacific time - Irvine, CA) each and every night. Many people used to call this "honor" lag. What seems to be happening is that Blizzard is updating their servers at this time. The result is that corpses can't be looted, vendors can't be interacted with and ultimately death occurs if you happen to be fighting a mob.

Recently, the problems have gotten much worse since the 2.4 patch as Blizzard has changed the way these background maintenance tasks operate. Now Oceanic servers are crashing more frequently during these time periods.

Blizzard needs to publicly address this and allocate some resources into fixing this problem. The patience level of Australian and New Zealand players is starting to show signs of reaching the breaking point.

Blizzard needs to either find a way to eliminate these background maintenance tasks or move them to a time period that is non-prime time for Oceanic players. While 2am to 5 am may be non-prime time for USA players, it's prime time for Oceanic players.
 

Yeah these issues aren't just "Oceanic" servers

I play on Blackrock.. but i'm an Australian, and the same lockups, lag outs etc occurr around the same times.

Massive loot lag, or a server crash, and the server dies for 15 minutes

Thsi is all happening at 3am - 7am.

Which brings me to the other STAIN on "Oceanic" realms.

Maint still occurrs in the US even tho for the Oceanic servers, its currently prime time, and you have many very good guilds trying to raid, with server crashes, lag outs, and maintenance

Its fucking annoying.
 

Well, for the Oceanic players out there, you're about to have a better option. EA Mythic has announced that they will put a server farm in your part of the world.

So either you will be able to migrate to Warhammer and have a playable game finally, or Blizzard will be forced to properly localize your hardware as they should have sooner, or in the best of all worlds, you will get both.

If Blizzard wants to stay competitive in Oceania, you might expect to see a server farm for Aussies and NZ.
 

Its not just on MMO servers that us Aussies get the short end of the stick (to be honest its not just Australians but anywhere outside the North American/EU gaming hegemony).

Our supply of games is generally limited in comparison to the US and arrive on our shores at a much later date (barring digital delivery). Not to mention that a lot of publishers don't see us as a worthwhile market.

On the Steam platform, for example, Ubisoft has not allowed its games to be purchased by us, this is a bit of a WTF and I can only assume that our currency carries some kind of viral taint that they don't want to be exposed to.

Atari have had a wonderful history of pulling game boxes earmarked for our shores to cover shortfalls in US supply (I remember being pissed about it when they did this for DDO, mind you I'm embarressed about that now).

Top it all off with the fact that we are overcharged for most games (console games are generally $90 - $110 while PC are generally $60 - $90AU while our exchange rate with the US is close to 1 for 1 atm) its getting to the point where its probably more economical for me to buy the games from overseas and have them shipped to me.

But you're right Tobold... as a nation our raw numbers just don't add up. The fact that on a per capita basis we are one of the biggest spenders on games/consoles/DVD's and also a well known early adopter nation is obviously not enough. What is the few measly millions of dollars of revenue we generate for Blizzard in the face of the untold billions they get from elsewhere.

Newer MMO's are being a little more global. Pirates of the Burning Seas have local Aussie servers and WAR is also going to launch with one. Whether or not they do anything clever like scheduling downtime for our local low usage times or not remains to be seen.