All right you two, let’s be kind please. This is understandably frustrating since it’s been going on so long.
I’ve been heavily working in other forums lately, and I’d expected this would have been resolved by now. Looking at Noveau’s area, it still looks like you’re consistent with the average ping. Your average on the IP Nicole had you test is 90 ms. That IP is for Chicago. Here’s the deal:
“Blizzard can’t investigate why your traffic is specifically being routed closer to LA than Chicago by your ISP, as they are not their customer, and have no rights to that information.”
This is the problem. When you try to go to Chicago (24.105.62.129) you first go to a peer in Vancouver - assuming the DB IP lookup for this IP is still accurate. (STTLWAWBCI01.bb.telus.com)
I have no insight into the peering policies and partners your ISP uses, or what backbones are available in Canada. However, the ISP is routing you to Vancouver even when you are trying to go to Chicago. After it hits Vancouver it hits our peers in Seattle, Washington. Washington is a long way from Chicago.
Because of this, the latency is going to be a wash either way. I did a mass lookup of players in your area, and I see them connecting to both Chicago and LA servers. There is almost no difference in ping, and at different points the tests to Chicago are worse, and at others the tests to LA are worse. Even if you were connected to Chicago you wouldn’t know from a performance standpoint because the ping tests to BOTH server groups from your area are in the ~100 ms range, give or take maybe 10 ms which are normal internet fluctuations.
You basically have two choices here - you can contact your ISP and see if they can route players on your ISP to a different peer on the way to blizzard servers in chicago. This said, this is not guaranteed to work because they may not have other options. You definitely want to be talking to a tier 2 or 3 about this, as I would be exceedingly surprised if your ISP is giving your frontline agents peering lists.
In the mean time, you can grab a VPN which should re route you through the internet by using different peers than your ISP has deals with. This is a work around, however, and we don’t directly support VPNs. You’ll need to do some research and pick one that works for you.
I can’t address your suggestions to have players select their own servers or change the test itself, but if that’s something you want to try to suggest you can do so at the general forums.
Sorry this took so long to figure out, but with that new data you shared it made everything make more sense. I was able to see you hitting peers you shouldn’t have hit from your area going to chicago, which made me finally think to check which peers your ISP were sending you on. Hopefully this gives you the insight you need to work this out with the ISP though.