Post by Steve Farrelly @ 05:57pm 20/03/14 | 44 Comments
“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.”Located in a Sydney datacentre, the servers are now running local Diablo 3 game instances started by Australian players. An official FAQ explains that Australian players still default to the North American region, and connect through Battle.net service there -- so friends lists and saved character etc will remain the same -- but when a game is launched, the server instance is now spawned on the new Sydney-based hardware, offering local players a much smoother game experience.
Notably, the arrangement still allows Australian and North American players to play together (or Asia and Europe via ‘global play’), with the server instance being established locally to whichever player started the game. Limited availability of the Australian hardware might still see some Australian players spawning US-hosted servers, with the exception of death-is-permanent hardcore characters, which Blizzard says will be restricted to local servers only, with a queuing system if they’re full.
Australian gamers have been begging Blizzard for local servers for its various PC games for many years, so it’s great to see some love coming to Diablo 3. As for its other games, the publisher remains tight-lipped, only saying “we will continue to explore optimal server solutions for all of our franchises in each region”.
The forthcoming MOBA/ARTS title Heroes of the Storm seems a likely candidate, and perhaps StarCraft 2 if we’re lucky. World of Warcraft, not so much, as it would still require enough local players to sustain a viable game world/economy, and to justify the publisher's hosting expense. Who knows though, maybe they'll surprise us.
The new servers are active now for players to enjoy, so jump in and report back with your experiences in the Comments section.
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Posted 07:52pm 20/3/14
Posted 07:53pm 20/3/14
Posted 08:19pm 20/3/14
Posted 08:20pm 20/3/14
Posted 08:35pm 20/3/14
Posted 09:50pm 20/3/14
Posted 10:17pm 20/3/14
Posted 10:24pm 20/3/14
Posted 10:25pm 20/3/14
Posted 10:34pm 20/3/14
Posted 10:57pm 20/3/14
Posted 10:58pm 20/3/14
Posted 11:31pm 20/3/14
are you considering for just one moment that micro-purchases might one day lay in the hands of self-owning gaming admins? What kind of witchcraft is this? We;ll teach you PC gamers...! You'll be paying a premium for internet to play PC based games here in the US in the very near future - you mark my words ( etc etc etc ). Yeah - it's coming.
btw - is it me, or is the 'EA SimCity' post exposing EA employees spruking the offline mode suddenly gone from Reddit now? Anyone catch and grab it?
Posted 12:14am 21/3/14
Posted 01:47am 21/3/14
Posted 04:21am 21/3/14
Posted 09:11am 21/3/14
Posted 09:40am 21/3/14
There's probably hope for Aussie WoW servers, but not in the way you might expect. They're doing a lot of work on virtualisation lately, bringing realms closer together for instance, and I think the way the D3 servers work is a hint to how localisation of WoW might one day creep in.
It wouldn't surprise me if one day in the medium term Aussies on Oceanic servers didn't spawn into local instances of dungeons that reported back player loot / character changes to the boss server on delay but otherwise ran the show. For mixed premade groups, the group / raid leader would determine the location of the instance. The same thing in theory could happen in the world but introduces deeper phasing than might be desired.
Was wondering last night if all this work they are doing on virtualisation and cross-realm stuff might not indicate a direction for their new MMO ... serverless, just one big, fat world? O_o
Posted 10:02am 21/3/14
I noticed that this wasn't 'new' news.
I keep forgetting about WoW (I avoided the game like the plague).
It seems an age since I've heard anything from WoW (other than about their 'last, last expansion') for some time.
Is it still kicking strong? or have player numbers dwindled somewhat?
Posted 10:36am 21/3/14
Anyone interested in playing HC now that we have a local server? I want to give it a go but need someone to hold my hand :D
Posted 10:47am 21/3/14
Posted 10:53am 21/3/14
Nah f***em, you laugh and move on.
Shame you can't loot their corpse TBH
Posted 10:59am 21/3/14
Posted 11:05am 21/3/14
Warning: I'll think it was a s*** idea once I die.
Posted 11:45am 21/3/14
that is why i will probably stay away from hardcore
i can only imagine the hoggy rage when he dies
Posted 11:54am 21/3/14
Posted 11:54am 21/3/14
Not as strong as wrath days when it was at 14 million subs or whatever crazy number it was at the time, but its still in the realm of 7 - 8 million. It fluctuates a bit as new content comes out or people get bored, but generally holding steady around there. They've done a kind of server merge and connected a lot of the low pop servers together to give them a better population, so that helps too.
But yeah, its awesome to see more people seriously considering Australian servers for stuff, first Titanfall now this, its setting a promising precedent!
Posted 11:57am 21/3/14
My goal before RoS is to hit P100.
Btw anyone else get f*** all legendaries dropping? My mate gets a tonne of drops and I get jack s***. Loot 2.0 my ass.
Posted 12:00pm 21/3/14
Posted 01:07pm 21/3/14
No NBNs or I so would
Posted 01:43pm 21/3/14
I was pretty happy when I saw the 30-40ms pings after jumping on a few days ago :D
Posted 01:59pm 21/3/14
i want to you setup a video recorder behind your computer and record when you play, just keep recording over it until you die
then post the video of you destroying your monitor with your keyboard
Posted 02:40pm 21/3/14
Posted 01:18am 22/3/14
Bottle of red, 10mg of valium and i'm level 16 after 90 odd minutes of play (the community boost is pretty rad (50% XP boost), so take advantage if you're not already.
Posted 09:45am 22/3/14
Posted 09:52am 22/3/14
Posted 11:13am 22/3/14
I've got a script for it. I don't take it often, every once in a while i'll have it and it's delicious.
Posted 11:53am 22/3/14
this. may have considered getting back into wow
Posted 01:19pm 22/3/14
Posted 01:41pm 22/3/14
Posted 03:55pm 22/3/14
Posted 07:21pm 22/3/14
Truth be told, if I hadn't seen this article, I'd have never known.
http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/video-of
Posted 07:31pm 22/3/14
WoW does the same thing re: walking. Walking is instant so the game doesn't feel like s*** - but in regards to spells, every player needs to see what's happening as soon as possible. So attacks/spells/abilities are still done on the server and are therefore laggy. (Think PvP)
There is upsides and downsides to both methods, but the rule of thumb still is you can't defeat latency at the software level. Compare BF to a game like COD. Different ways of dealing with latency but both games have their nuances.
Posted 09:24pm 22/3/14
Look it made it playable for sure, and this is coming fro someone who couldn't stomach D2 Realms. But the difference between what the server believes to be the truth and what you believe to be the truth becomes very clear when you get yoinked back into a Frozen effect you were clearly out of.
It did a good job of pretending to be low latency but without allowing the client to determine the truth (ie, inviting hax) it was always limited. Skills like Dashing Strike just work better with true low latency.