Routing to Singapore instead of Sydney servers from Adelaide

I live in Adelaide, South Australia and my ISP is Superloop.

Since I started playing Overwatch a few years ago I’ve been connecting to the Sydney servers which was great. I’d occasionally connect to a Singaporean server or even a west-coast US server.

I’ve recently, in probably the past month or two, always find myself connecting to Singaporean servers and never to the Sydney servers which causes my game latencies to be higher. When connecting to Sydney I used to get a latency of around 40ms. When connecting to Singapore I get a latency of around 100-200ms.

I’ve included the traceroute for the Singaporean server to help troubleshoot. The other night I was spectating a friend (Perth based) in-game on the Sydney server (37.244.42.19:26517) so I’ve included a traceroute log for that too.

Traceroute for gsg1.

C:\>tracert 34.126.121.149

Tracing route to 149.121.126.34.bc.googleusercontent.com [34.126.121.149]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.2.1
  2    10 ms    53 ms     9 ms  Loopback1.bng01-sbb-274hindl-adl.au.superloop.com [122.199.18.1]
  3     9 ms     8 ms     8 ms  bundle-ether13-100.bdr01-ipt-274hindl-adl.au.superloop.net.co [203.153.17.25]
  4    17 ms    18 ms    18 ms  hundredgige0-0-1-2-110.bdr01-ipt-826lorim-mel.au.superloop.net.co [103.200.13.116]
  5    18 ms    17 ms    17 ms  hundredgige0-0-1-3.bdr01-ipt-530colli-mel.au.superloop.net.co [103.200.13.101]
  6    18 ms    18 ms    18 ms  72.14.205.244
  7     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  8    18 ms    18 ms    17 ms  216.239.56.48
  9    18 ms    17 ms    18 ms  172.253.53.114
 10    55 ms    64 ms    62 ms  142.250.239.223
 11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 12    92 ms    90 ms    91 ms  209.85.253.230
 13    91 ms    91 ms    91 ms  209.85.246.15
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21     *     ^C
C:\>

Traceroute for syd2.

C:\>tracert 37.244.42.19

Tracing route to 37.244.42.19 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.2.1
  2    20 ms     9 ms     9 ms  Loopback1.bng01-sbb-274hindl-adl.au.superloop.com [122.199.18.1]
  3     9 ms    10 ms     9 ms  bundle-ether13-100.bdr01-ipt-274hindl-adl.au.superloop.net.co [203.153.17.25]
  4    28 ms    26 ms    27 ms  fortygige0-0-1-3.bdr01-ipt-262frank-adl.au.superloop.net.co [103.200.13.176]
  5    26 ms    27 ms    27 ms  hundredgige0-0-1-2-108.bdr01-ipt-4edenpar-syd.au.superloop.net.co [103.200.13.114]
  6    31 ms    30 ms    30 ms  as57976.nsw.ix.asn.au [218.100.52.65]
  7    31 ms    31 ms    30 ms  137.221.85.35
  8   150 ms   150 ms   150 ms  et-0-0-0-pe02-eqsy4.as57976.net [137.221.85.71]
  9     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 10     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 12     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19  ^C
C:\>

The server you end up on has to do with how high your ping is based on ISP routing. So if the client sends you to GSG1, it means your ping to that server is lower than the route being used to reach SYD2.

In the SYD2 example the routing goes directly from the Superloop network to Blizzard Peering (check the whois for 137.221.85.35 and 137.221.85.71). The latency jump was on the final Blizzard Peering hop.

It doesn’t make sense for it to jump to 150ms in that final hop if it’s in Australia still.

In the GSG example, is goes directly from the Superloop network into Google’s network, hops about for a bit within Google’s network and then the latency jumps.

Thoughts?

Unfortunately, as a volunteer on the forum I have no control over the routing used. They place you based on best ping and available players for the mode selected. You might try the ticket system if you feel you’ve spotted something super irregular, but this seems pretty standard to me between the two servers.

Happens from NZ too, latency goes from 20ms to Aus all the way up to 200ms for Singapore.

At that point I’d rather be on US West servers because they only give 160ms.