Dear Jeff or other Dev's - Regarding South African Servers

General Discussion
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Dear Overwatch Dev’s,

I have owned Overwatch since December 2016 yet it has been out since day one here. The game is one of my favorite past times and its one place where I can have fun with friends.

The issues arises with the lack of support for South African players on your front. There are no servers at all in the whole continent of Africa. This means we have to connect to EU servers, meaning we can be experiencing ping from 170-220 sometimes. I use to play at 200 as my internet wasn’t the best but since I got Fiber I have been playing at 170 ping and suddenly I jumped two full skill tears in competitive (coincidence?)

I propose the question, why don’t you support your fans down here? We are a decent community, the gaming community in South Africa is quite big with the biggest gaming competition is the Southern Hemisphere taking place on our very soil. So I ask why don’t you set up servers her, Valve and many other companies have. It would make the game more enjoyable and fair.

Please respond.

Matthew

EDIT After like 20 min of this post being up, the guys at Gameranx posted this video which I hopes gets my point across: ‘Why Does It Suck To Play On A Game Server From A Different Region?’ youtu.be/Kd4HnOKOXE4

19 Likes
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I hoping the devs read this. This is an issue I’ve been finding in another gaming communities, it will take time to set up a server in Africa.

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Yeah but I, and others, would like to know if this is ever going to happen. Been petitions for years now and the game is almost on its second anniversary. Just wanted to raise the question in the new forums. Thanks for the support

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Surprised you still have nothing over there, I remember posts like this year one.

Seems like a huge oversight, plenty of potential new customers over there if they actually provided good servers.

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Serious question there any major server farms in S. Africa?

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Yes many. Even dedicated ones for gaming such as Valve games through Mweb I believe it is.

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If there would be any large server farms, I’d imagine it’d be either in SA somewhere or at the very least somewhere close to the Mediterranean, or both

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With all the resources Blizzard is pumping into OWL they’re probably more focused on taking care of things at home before investing to improve services worldwide.

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Here is the video Why Does It Suck To Play On A Game Server From A Different Region? youtu.be/Kd4HnOKOXE4

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That would be Egypt

Valve no longer uses MWEB - they shut down services through them because S. Africans complained the server was shoddy.

UPDATE

MWEB no longer hosts the South African CS:GO servers. This means we are unable to assist with any issues regarding matchmaking, ping, and other disconnection problems that you may face while playing the game.

As far as I am aware Valve had to make their own Datacenter in S. Africa as there were no other reliable companies. Which is why I was asking if any major companies placed their Data center there like Amazon

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Actually forgot they no longer used MWEB but still same concept, also the fact that they have their own centers regardless. Not sure about Amazon for example but we do have our own big shipping services (over and above Amazon) that are local like Takealot which would obviously have Data Centers here. Most likely a few companies do. EA also has servers here.

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Well cast time is really easy for mercy to die so i recommend that mercy didn’t have that also she can only res once

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EA uses Akami for data distribution
and Licenses dedicated servers to reputable hosts.
They don’t have any server presence in SA.

Takealot is just a Product Shipping company.
They don’t have Cloud Hosting services.

I was specifically referencing Amazon AWS
https://aws.amazon.com/
https://aws.amazon.com/gaming/game-server/

On further inspection TakeALot is hosted by a company called
Internet Solutions

So they would be the Major server farm in SA.
https://www.is.co.za/blog/articles/is-owns-first-nexcenter-accredited-colocation-centre-in-africa/

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If I remember correctly Blizzard uses AWS for it’s hosting.

Until recently Amazon has had next to nothing in Africa. I think in December they launched AWS Direct Connect in South Africa. If they expand to offering full AWS services in South Africa you might see Blizzard Servers provided they feel the demand is high enough.

With that said, the political situation in South Africa may or may not limit Amazon’s expansion.