I am constantly connecting to the PSE1 and LAX1 servers during ordinary gaming times (midday till 10pm) from Melbourne, Australia. There are times where I connect to Sydney (PSE2) servers, but it is far and few between.
I am seeing other players experience this as well, as the drop-out rate in QP is really high, and other people are complaining… I am yet to try Comp as I don’t want to risk it on 100-300 ping.
Does anyone know what is going on?
Cant be sure, but a few other players and I suspected that the servers in Sydney are down because of the fires.
Why would the fires cause the servers to go down? Surely the servers would be in the Sydney city centre or something?
I would suspect that many of the routes you use to reach the servers are down or gone, not the servers themselves.
So Nicole, if that were the case, then I would be getting 300 ping servers all the time, no? What is actually happening is I’m getting 300 ping servers interspersed with 30 ping servers so either the poles holding the lines are falling down and getting up repeatedly… or what is much more likely is Blizzard has a problem on their end. Particularly given this only ever happens on Blizzard games.
The normal route probably has too much traffic and is intermittently passing you off somewhere else. This could cause you to get placed on other servers because it looks like your connection is coming from somewhere else.
Another reason could be that there is a smaller pool of players available to meet match requirements (SR, roles, etc) in your region, because of the fires. That would make the game look outside your normal server for people to group with. This is just a guess on my part.
This is really unlikely. Blizzard constantly monitors server health and telemetry data for their servers. If that was the problem, they usually just respond by claiming blame and telling you they’re “working on it.” This is especially true on their Twitter pages.
So, in short, you have no idea. Taking random guesses as to what could possibly be causing this is, to be frank, no help at all.
Why? Why is it “really unlikely”? I’m not some conspiracy nut claiming that “BLIZZARD IS SECRETLY HIDING THE TRUTH!” however there are a lot of things that could go wrong somewhere at Blizzard’s facility that aren’t the servers which would still affect the ability to connect to them. Maybe its an intermittent problem? In which case when Blizzard do their checks, everything looks fine and then the problem comes back.
What you have failed to answer though is if this isn’t a Blizzard problem why then is Blizzard the only service that is ever affected by this problem. Surely when I play games on Sydney servers from other game providers my connection isn’t telepathically transmitted over the aether is it? So then why am I never put on 300 ping EA servers? Or 300 ping Ubisoft servers? You can’t tell me this isn’t a Blizzard problem and then also tell me that magically every single other game service out there has magically solved this problem and Blizard hasn’t, but its still somehow not a Blizzard problem. That’s just silly.
I don’t work for Blizzard (MVPs are volunteers), I’m just trying to help add some perspective with my networking and game function knowledge.
Drakuloth (Blizzard staff) has elaborated on this when another player had the same doubts:
This has already been answered in the pinned threads, so I didn’t want to restate things you may have already read:
No one was answering in this thread and I was trying to help, but I wasn’t expecting this response to the information. I hope things go back to normal soon for everyone.
Look I know you’re not a Blizzard employee, but…that’s kind of my point. I’m not expecting any answers in the next however long, I understand these things take time. However when someone comes in and links me things I’ve already read, like the Common Technical Issues and Solutions page which basically says “if we’ve found an issue at Blizzard we’ll put it on Twitter” which is great…if they’ve found it. But the one of the whole point’s of this forum, I’d think, is for the times they haven’t found a problem. Not for people like you to come in and say “Well its very unlikely its a problem at Blizzard even though there is literally no problem anywhere else. There is no war in Ba Sing Se.”
So no, neither of my specific questions are answered by those threads at all. They just say that Blizzard is looking at things and if they find something, they’ll say something. Which is great, but if they haven’t found something and there is still a problem these threads do nothing to answer my point.
Hey folks,
Just wanted to let you know that we’re aware of some odd routing issues with oceanic players and the AUS servers at the moment. The developers are on the case. Sorry we didn’t post earlier on this matter - we just got word on this being a confirmed issue.
While in this case it did turn out to be our issue, in a lot of cases it becomes useful or even necessary to do basic troubleshooting and provide testing information. Exploring other avenues and doing troubleshooting does help us narrow down issues, and tests will help us confirm problems we may suspect on our end. We do proactively monitor our own services as Nicole mentioned, so when there are widespread issues we’ll try to comment on them as quickly as possible, but obviously we tech forum blues are not always in office to do so.
Because of this, please ensure that you’re working with us and MVPs when we try to troubleshoot, even if it you suspect something is on our end. The extra information is usually relevant.
Either way, thanks for the reports! I’ll let you know if I hear anything else today.
Edit: We’ve made some tweaks and believe that this problem should be handled now. Can people who were having problems with getting routed to the wrong servers (instead of the Sydney servers) please check to see if it worked? If not, please post at the main thread.