Hi there. I have a fiber connection and usually am matched on either US Central or US West for my games, resulting in a regular ping of ~20 ms and ~55 - 60 ms, respectively. I’ve recently been experiencing odd games where the ping is ~220+ ms and believe it to be a routing issue, as the game itself is still hosted in ORD1 or another US-based datacenter.
I used a traceroute to the US Central ip when this happened and received an odd result, where one step in the route is between ~600 - 1400 ms. I’ve now been using a traceroute whenever this problem occurs and regular see similar cases where the routing is extremely high. Would anyone be able to advise what may cause this? I can send the screenshot to any staff requesting it, as I can’t post the photo or link to an upload site on this board.
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ORD is the central US server, located in Chicago (ORD is O’Hare airport). LAS is the other US server, in Las Vegas.
The recent DDoS attacks forced Blizzard to change some routing steps, and many ISPs are still catching up. You may be experiencing that.
EU ISPs also need to make updates. You can reach out to your ISP for more information.
Can you be more specific as to how we should approach our ISPs?
Its very difficult to explain the issue to someone who doesn’t know Overwatch.
Firstly, they question if we’re “selecting” the right server. But the game is the one that decides the nearest server during matchmaking;
Then the IP address of the game servers itself looks like some kind of proxy, so its not obvious its a local IP address.
Lastly the ISPs are not necessarily in ownership of the routing itself, which needs to be escalated.
Some more technical information we can pass to the ISPs would go a long way. What did Blizzard change on their end? What does the ISP need to “make updates” and accommodate?
For myself I’m from the OCE region. The routing issues are nightly now and nearly unplayable.
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It’s also weird since my brother and I are on the same network. I have a 25ms ping and he randomly gets 400 while in the same game.
A friend and her husband have had similar things happen to them.
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Since this thread is about connecting to the US-located servers, the information here may not be relevant to your situation.
I’m a fellow player and do not work in Blizzard’s network operations. Posts from staff and other US players who’ve been in touch with their ISPs are where I learned that Blizzard changed how they handle incoming traffic. Although I do have real-life experience with networking, I’m not going to get into the details because it won’t be helpful to you or given as secondhand info to your ISP. Instead, any ISP can follow their standard operating procedure of getting in contact another company’s network team to get the specific information they need.
But again, none of the posts I’m referencing for this info are related to the OCE region, so there may be a different problem happening for you. I know many OCE players have been complaining about landing on SEA servers, but that’s related to not enough players near the Sydney server being online to fill matches.
Happened again with ORD1. Queued most of the evening at normal ping, and then suddenly am routed around the world back to ORD1 with 360 ms. This is extremely unacceptable, and I wish they’d at least acknowledge the issue.
Your ISP handles your routing, not Blizzard. If you have gathered data that shows the connection actually going around the world (not just the ping response times), then you’d want to present it to your ISP.
That’s a change from what you’ve said in past threads about ISP routing issues and latency. How can there not be enough players near Sydney online to fill a match when the players in the matches are predominantly from Sydney/NSW?
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We get put in SEA servers even though everyone in both my team and the other team are from OCE!
I’ve been put on SEA in the middle of a stadium match even though the entire lobby is from OCE and the previous stadium rounds were on OCE servers.
TBH I find the response here from the Blizzard “Tech MVP” completely unreasonable, especially considering the severity of the issue.
Players who have been playing this game for years are now suddenly facing random, game-breaking lag, and the response we get is that “recent DDoS attacks forced Blizzard to change some routing steps.”
Yeah OK, no probs, but that occurred weeks ago… why are we still dealing with this?
And then, the suggested solution is to “reach out to your ISP for more information”?
This response is incredibly dismissive and condescending. This isn’t an issue that we should have to troubleshoot on our own by contacting our ISPs…
It’s Blizzard’s responsibility to ensure the routing systems are working as they should, and not leave us in a situation where we’re trying to explain technical issues to ISP support agents who likely have little to no understanding (or care) of OW’s network infrastructure.
We should not have to become network engineers to resolve an issue caused by changes on Blizzard’s end…
At the very least, a more hands-on approach to resolving this problem would go a long way…
At the moment I’m pretty annoyed I paid for a Battlepass for a season I can barely play…
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I don’t work at Blizzard.
They are responsible for ensuring the server is online at the datacenter they pay for hosting. Blizzard makes games, not the internet. Routing is an issue ISPs handle.
This forum is only player-to-player troubleshooting; the staff who used to participate here have been reassigned or moved on over a year ago.
Over a month now and this issue is still unresolved.
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EU still laggy too, I don’t know what Blizz expects from us, like I’m gonna contact my ISP and tell them “yeah so my game Overwatch is a bit laggy, can you guys fix the routing please?”, they’re never going to fix it on their end either.
OMG ! Same issu Europe server! this is for weeks that I try everthing on my computer, repair the game, manage my malwarebyte etc … damn why I dont come check on US friend server 
same topic on French channel : Gros problème de latence récurent - nº 23 par Buffy-22150 - Assistance Technique - Overwatch Forums
Is there someone who work again for Blizzard overwatch team, or they just watching the game died by himself ?
same, we are 2 playing on the same network, and for no reason, one of us get a fu****ing 200ms ping when the other have 30ms.
Reboot computer’s do nothing… and If after the ranked, jump to a quick play, by magic, 30ms back…
Still having the same issues. ISP has researched my ticket and confirmed that it’s out of their control as well.
+1 to this being an Issue. Two players in this household, one with 300ms+ and the other with 30ms.
This needs attention.
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