Non-NA player groups on NA servers

I’m not sure if this is a common thing or not, but it seems like there are quite a few non-NA player groups/friends changing their regions to NA and playing together as a group (of whatever number) on our servers here - resulting in a lag fest of the worst kind.

If the players are good, we get stomped - but in the laggiest way possible. Why players can change their regions across international distances to begin with is beyond me. It doesn’t do anything but muck the matches regardless of whether this trend is common or not :frowning:

You won’t get affected by someone changing their region and playing with high ping.

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I remember the halo 3 and halo reach days where the game would pause because of “host migration” if someone quit the match. If hots uses a similar type of system then its possible someone’s else’s lag could affect you, but I am not sure this is the case. I have not seen this in hots though so I doubt this type of matchmaking system is in place, but I am also not super well versed in that category. I’m just stating my experience based on other games that may or may not apply here.

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That should happen if someone hosted the game, but Hots has dedicated servers.

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I guess that my null hypothesis is correct and hots and halo servers work differently. To be quite honest, I don’t think I have ever dealt with lag that came from someone else’s connection. Whenever I lag, my own ping is really high. This just came to mind because its something I’ve experienced in the games mentioned so I thought it might apply here.

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Yeah same here, if I’m lagging it’s usually on my end. Could be the server, but then everyone is lagging and it’s not because someone with high ping is playing.

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Wouldn’t it only lag for them?

When I played with Xylord, I didn’t have more latency than usual.

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Yeah, Darak is right. The HotS servers act as the host so it should lag for them.

In WoW, it’s a different story because of sharding so the host server can change based on shards. For instance, if I do a world boss using group finder at night when oceanic people are awake and people in NA are asleep, I’ll get loaded into an oceanic shard and lag like hell.

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The only circumstances where you would be moved to an overseas server (where you would experience high latency) is if you are in a group and anyone has “Best Match” selected.

Go to settings and make sure your preferred game server is set to “North America”, as I think the default is “Best Match.”

Having said that, as others have pointed out, players from any other region will not cause you latency if you’re playing on the NA server. They will experience lag, but you will not.

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ok, thx for the info.

Exactly.

There is only one way to end up in lag inferno without changing your preferred server, and that’s by grouping up (before a match starts) with a lot of foreigners.

If you join a premade of 4 filipinos as the 5th player from US, the match will almost certainly start on the PH server instead.

It is somewhat playable on slower heroes like Azmo or Abathur, but close to impossible on fast paced/quick reflex based heroes like Tracer or Fenix.

Note that lag inferno (+200 server ping) can’t happen as a solo player, as a solo the match wont start until 9 others from your region are found.

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