No one said 200ping is closer. The path taken makes the originating connection appear closer to the farther server.
You did, in July. Regarding the exact same issue.
This issue is completely on Blizzard and their Overwatch matchmaker. This issue does not occur in other games.
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Read what I said again because youāre interpreting something completely different.
If your connection appears it is coming from NEAR Singapore (due to Telstra routing you near that country), then the server will place you on Singapore servers.
That isnāt relevant to the situation youāre discussing.
Then this is a problem. Why is the game basing a server on where it thinks the routing is going? People have been complaining for years and you have been repeating the SAME advice that it is routing.
Why not just fix players to a server of preference? OR at the very least have an accept button and show which server youāre being āroutedā to.
Again, no other games have this problem except for OW and itās being done for the purpose of engagement.
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it does in smash legends!!! telstra sends you to sea and optus sends you toā¦ i forgot, too lazy to check but itās better
and yes i have 2 internets
since i started overwatch 2 years ago, i have used the same telstra internet (itās actually a router that uses the mobile towers) and only in the past week this has started and it wonāt go away no matter what
blizzards fault or not itās still weird thereās no solution, this stuff happens even outside of OCE/SEA
tell me about it, fortnite uses ping and it NEVER gets it wrong
edit: if i get 40ms in fortnite, would 80ms in overwatch be OCE? i canāt check because i play on console but i always have played overwatch with 80-90msā¦ have i just been on SEA this whole time??? only this week iāve been getting 150ms+ though 
Definitely not against this at all, but I donāt work at Blizzard. Additionally, they do not collect feedback in this forum, like I mentioned earlier in this thread.
You donāt have a forever-permanent route to any service across the globe. ISPs change their routing tables as they feel necessary.
I highly suggest adding feedback about the server picker in General Discussion. Since I can land on two different servers in the U.S., I suggested this a long time ago.
Probably 1 in 5 games I play are entire lobbies of players from New Zealand to Perth, over 5,000km away from each other, all being placed in a Singapore server with a 150+ ping, making the game near on unplayable. Itās basically just who gets frustrated and throws first that decides the game.
It seems being able to be able to pick the server you want has been suggested for a long time, and despite being a trivial change, nothing has been done about it. I fully expect this post to be completely ignored, but at least the threat will have closure date will be resetā¦
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This is really annoying. I really hope they fix this.
blizzard doesnāt allow server change via the bnet launcher But
there is a way to change your preferred server, howerver i cannot say anything about this. the last time i did my post got flagged and i got a forum chat ban for two weeks
all i can say is google
Iām guessing this involves āstrengtheningā the Windows firewall? Iāve looked at this a bit, the funny thing is the people whoāve looked into this a fair bit also seem to believe the issue of getting distant servers is most common around the time the server appears to reach capacity.
Just like last time I played, copped a Singapore server. Next game I get an Aus server and the server crashes with an unexpected error halfway through the gameā¦
It also seems a bit strange youād get a two week ban for doing something like that if it was purely an ISP routing issue causing you to get the Singapore server.
Hi Nicole, do you have any links to info where it says routing/last hop is the only thing which decides which datacentre youāre placed on? Iām not sure if itās current, but a long thread (Information about the Global Play server selection) on the general forums about Global play / Cross Play talks about how the region selection was removed and how large numbers of people started having the existing issue weāre having here. It also mentions players are knowingly placed in further away datacentres for matchmaking and capacity reasons and has a Blizzard post confirming this.
Despite this long post, it looks like not a lot has been done about it since.
I play in Perth (Aus) which has a direct fibre to Singapore. Iām working with my ISP now as Iām not being routed Perth-Singapore directly, but instead it looks like Perth > Sydney > Singapore, which causes me to have a ping of 140. Despite this, Iām still regularly being placed in Singapore servers. This, coupled with the fact youāre able to specify which datacentre you want to create a custom match on makes me extremely sceptical this issue is caused by anything other than reducing hosting costs or inflating player statistics across regions.
There was a huge post explaining it, and Iāve been looking for it on/off since the holidays ended. Unfortunately, I think it was posted before Blizzard swapped forum systems (Iāve been here a long time), and all of those posts are gone. However, I have mentioned this process hundreds of times in the new forum, and the staff who followed up in those threads did not dismiss it as false or misleading info.
Some background on this post: It was created when Kaedi was an MVP like me, but now she is the Overwatch Community Manager and has a staff account. (And before someone assumes, not all MVPs want to work at Blizzard. 
)
It is true that you are no longer restricted to a specific region, but the game client is still trying to get you the best ping to play on.
In Overwatch, you cannot select a play region; instead, the game will place you into the best match based on your ping.
source: Selecting a Battle.net Region - Blizzard Support
āDetermined by last hopā is the shorthand way of explaining that your ISP could be routing you much farther away from your target server than usual and/or super close to another server. So, in this case, the ISP is routing closer to Singapore than anywhere else, making the ping test results excellent to that datacenter, so thatās where you get matched. If your route went somewhere close to Los Angeles, youād be placed on the Las Vegas server ā because the ping between Los Angeles and Las Vegas is excellent.
That post was not related to routing and connections, it was about MMR determining server placement (which they changed):
Not saying itās impossible for another issue to happen, but I donāt think these issues are related at all.
Interesting thought, but why would they allow custom games on the Sydney server if they want to reduce its load? I would think custom games require more math and processing than most of the regular modes due to the outlandish settings that can be applied in them.
If it was posted so long ago, would that not pre-date the global play update I linked though? It seems the global play update changed how this worked and is the starting point where people began having this issue, though the frequency of getting undesirable servers seems to go through peaks and troughs since.
My ISP is still looking into why none of my traffic is being routed direct Perth to Singapore (if it was it would explain why Iām getting the Singapore server and I also wouldnāt be complaining about the ping as it would only be about 50-60ms), so I havenāt really got anything useful to add there. Iād guess thereās probably a few factors why people would be allowed to choose the datacentre for a custom game.
I donāt have the stats, but Iām guessing the majority of the traffic comes from people playing modes where people have to queue, rather than custom lobbies.
If I were creating a custom lobby, not able to choose and didnāt get the data centre I wanted, Iād just restart it a few times hoping my last hop was coming up as somewhere else for a brief moment. Given my ping is constantly 140ms in a Singapore server, I imagine Iād just get the desired server pretty quickly. If not, I wouldnāt bother and would just do something else other than play OW. Instead, in modes other than custom, I donāt know Iām going to get the Singapore data centre before joining the game and Iām forced to stay in the game unless I want a banā¦
I donāt think Iāve ever had an undesirable server twice in a row either. If I did, Iād probably be willing to accept the penalty and just stop playing for the night. Given everyone speaking in game seems to have the issue about one in 5 games, I may try taking a break after 4 games and see how that affects my chances.
I doubt it. The posts I was referring to ā the ones where I outlined the process and it wasnāt disputed ā those happened from sometime in 2018 until January or March 2024. Thatās around the time when staff changes happened (less blues in forum).
The server hosting company changed twice in Overwatch 1 & 2ās history, so the only other changes for latency would be routing tables.
Something to keep in mind is that Blizzard has always offered all their troubleshooting efforts on a courtesy basis. These services are not part of the license purchase and were never guaranteed in perpetuity.
Additionally, the approach to troubleshooting connection problems changed last year to be more in line with other AAA titles. Most of the AAA gaming peers have a single connection troubleshooting webpage to point you in the right direction, but they donāt take tickets or have one-on-ones about your connection ā and they certainly wonāt chat up your ISP. Blizzard used to do all those things, but (I believe) that is too much responsibility and extra work for a gaming studio.
You can still open a ticket about a connection problem with Blizzard, but it seems the staff can only link you to the general connection troubleshooting page these days. I also havenāt seen a mention of them contacting an ISP in about a year (but I may have missed a mention during hurricane season), so that process was likely retired.
Edit: Added link to troubleshooting page.
I think Iāll keep posting to this until it gets fixed. Hopefully this will be one of their talking points in their upcoming āspotlightā. āweāre introducing the accept match button and will show you which server youāre going to play on.ā
I was just in an AUS server game with 30ms, a player leaves as the doors open for the match. I requeue and now Iām on a SEA server. FFS!!!
And again 
I hope they fix this.
Iām canadian and found myself playing on Koren servers with 300 ping. I usually get put in NA lobbys with 40ms no more or less. This has happened and it happened three times to my friend since we played this week and he was also put on servers based in mexico.
Also everytime we try out practice range we have 300ms, then we find a match and we are at 40 ms how it should be.
What is happening really, I had a terrible game where my teamates were cursing at me in korean and saying the f word to me in english.
I am not using a vpn and every external app on my computer were running fine such as discord with 20ms, this is impossible for the problem to be on my end, I would like blizzard to investigate this issue and will be willing to provide more information if necessary.
Surprised that my thread is still ongoing but glad to see im not the only one who experiences this on a frequent basis.
Since posting this, I have moved and am now on an entirely different ISP service (different nodes/infrastructure). Said issue is still ongoing an occuring at the same rate as before, being around 1/5-1/7 games. This entire time I have been using Exitlag, and even that does not assist.
This is especially baffling as I live in South Australia. So for it to have to route to Singapore, the lowest ping route would require it to go in the complete opposite direction of sydney and instead go towards Perth for the international cable lines.
I would really like it if the devs were able to implement a server select feature, as it would likely be the most straightforward solution, and also resolve the frustrations players have in other regions where they get places on unpreferable servers (Like for example US West players being placed on US East.).