I live in Egypt, and the best ping I can get is 70 ms when connected to a European server. However, I have many American friends that I love playing Overwatch with. Since I am the only one from this part of the world and the rest are in the United States, Overwatch will always put us in American servers. It depends on the majority. On American servers, my ping is consistently over 220 ms, which makes the game unplayable for me. At least on European servers, their ping averages around 100 ms, which is manageable compared to mine. So why isn’t there an option to manually select the server region? This feature would be incredibly useful, especially in Quick Play. Even using a VPN to change my location usually doubles my ping which is way worse.
The problem with this is players picking a server to up their lag giving them a disavantage at hitting stuff but an advantage at avoiding dmg. Theres a reason why VPNS are bannable in this game as so many peole would use the technique to climb the ladder. So it unfortunately has to remain the way it is to prevent it as much as possible. Again so you are aware stop using a vpn if blizzard detects it at all they will ban you ive been told so I would dbl check to verify that its more that some people use vpns to bypass their country restrictions so they have to banned detected usage or something in order to comply with those laws.
The introduction of a feature pretty much always comes down to benefits weighed against costs. Choosing your server seems like it has niche benefits, but at the cost of potential abuse by wangrods. Drum up enough support for it and you might see the feature added.
For servers what they need is an optional drop-down menu that shows Average PING and packet loss to each region.
With anything that is outside of 110ms to be “unadvised”
and anything 150ms or higher it shouldn’t allow a person to Q for.
Now for me, in the US, anything 65ms -70ms is unplayble. I usually hover at right around 38-44ms.