Brace yourselves, it’s gonna be a long one.
I’d like to begin this post mentioning that even though most of you all most likely do not play on the South American servers, currently located in Brazil, I thought it was a better idea to make this post in this forum instead of the forum in Spanish, because that one is barely used, so this post can actually be seen by someone. Also please excuse grammar or spelling mistakes, since English is not my main language (I’m trying my best). Now that that’s out of the way:
First, let’s talk about the servers themselves. Initially, we had servers located in Chile, Argentina and, of course, Brazil.
I’m from Chile, and most of the time, I’d play at around 35 ping, which is more than fair. Using voice chat was no problem either, since everyone who was in the game would speak the same language, Spanish.
Aside from some wonky matchmaking in competitive here and there after you hit 3000 sr, the servers were functioning properly and I, at least, was happy with how the game felt.
However, in 2019, around the time Role Queue and Sigma were introduced into the game, the servers from both Chile and Argentina were taken down seemingly out of nowhere. Blizzard’s response was that the decision was made for “reasons beyond their control”, and to this day we have not received any more information on the subject.
At the start however, it actually seemed to be a good change. I spoke with other players in-game during that time and most of us could agree that matchmaking was overall better, and queue times were faster. But as time went on, many problems have started to surface, and keep getting worse.
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Language barrier.
The playerbase from Brazil is significantly bigger than that of Chile and Argentina, so the chances of you playing with people who speak portuguese is significantly higher than encountering other spanish speakers, creating the already mentioned language barrier.
Even though Portuguese and Spanish are pretty similar languages and we can “understand” each other to an extent, it is not what i’d call an optimal level of communication, and can cause a lot of confusion at the moment of making key callouts. Some of us have resorted to speaking in english, hoping we’d be understood, others decided to just not speak of even join voice chat at all, and some others still speak spanish, knowing that they most likely will not be understood, but they at least put in the effort to communicate as a team. I’m not saying that people here in south america are incapable of speaking english or other languages, it’s just that from my experience, most people aren’t fluent in other languages. And for the ones that are, we’d much rather not, because, of course, we’re much more comfortable speaking the language we were raised with, even though I know some of us are willing to speak whatever language we know if necessary.
I’m aware that currently on the PTR, a new communication system is being tested, and so far I love it, and find it incredibly more useful than the current communication wheel. However, i wouldn’t say this would exactly fix communication problems, since you can’t really be specific calling out an enemy’s position or explaining a strategy that we could try while only having simple commands. Will it help? Absolutely. Will it solve the problem as a whole? No. -
Racism, Xenophobia and other disrespectful behavior.
As i mentioned above, some people do not know other languages, and that’s fine.
What’s not ok is that i’ve seen a lot, and trust me, a LOT of the “this is X country, we speak X language, and if you don’t, go **** yourself” situation. Mostly coming from the Portuguese speakers, as they are the ones who have a server in their country. This is what’s caused some people to either quit the game entirely or not even bother to speak in voice chat. If you are willing to use voice chat, you’re pretty much accepting that you WILL be harassed solely for speaking a language someone, most people, or everyone else on the team does not. And this goes both ways, from Portuguese to Spanish speakers, and vice versa. There’s even stereotypes forming, with things like “he speaks X language, so therefore he sucks at the game” or other xenophobic remarks like “Team of boludos/macacos* gg”. The amount of people i’ve seen insulting each other just because of what languages they speak is actually ridiculous, and unfortunately there’s nothing anyone of us can do about it other than just reporting and moving on to another game where the same will happen.
*Boludo is a word that, even though it’s technically a swear word in spanish, it’s used in casual conversation, much like saying “bro”. Like how you’d say “bro how are you doing?”. It’s now being used by portuguese speakers to refer to spanish speakers in a demeaning manner.
Macaco means, quite literally, monkey in portuguese, and it’s being used just like boludo. For spanish speakers to refer to portuguese speakers in a demeaning manner. -
The Server Itself
Remember how i said queue times were faster, and matchmaking was overall better? That was at the start, because now I can tell it’s literally the same as it was before CL/AR servers were taken down, if not worse.
|matchmaking.
I’m currently mid-diamond, sitting at around 3250 sr average, and i’ve been in many games where platinum players, or even golds, were matched against masters. They shouldn’t even be matched against mid diamond players, let alone masters. Even I don’t think I should play with/against masters yet.
|Queue times
Since we are a smaller playerbase, queue times when we had CL/AR servers ranged at around 8 - 10 minutes in 3000 sr, without role queue. Now, even though all the players are forced into the same servers, queue times either the same as before or worse. I’ve had to wait over 15 minutes not only as dps, (which I’m not surprised) but tank and support as well. Multiple times. You’d think with larger queue times the match you play would be more balanced, but as I explained above, that’s just not the case.
|Latency (for people who do not live in Brazil), random disconnects, and overall connection issues.
Overwatch is a fast-paced online fps, and as such, latency really matters, and can be a determining factor in whether you manage to achieve something or not. Let’s suppose two widowmakers face each other and shoot at the same time. Who’s gonna win? Of course, the one with less ping. By removing CL/AR, we’ve been forced to play with a latency of around 90-100, to even 200 for some people. To put it into perspective, it’s somewhat close as if people from east coast US were forced to play in EU, (basing myself on the latency that some of the friends i have on the US told me they got in EU) or possibly the other way around. And, this being the lowest possible latency we can get, is simply unfair, considering we’re playing against other people who will most definitely have way less latency than you. The game is just not fun when you can shoot at someone and have a small chance to have that shot (that could actually determine the outcome of a fight) not register, or seemingly get shot through a wall after you peeked a corner and went back into cover, even though in your screen they had no way to hit you.
Aside from that, the server has been really unstable, because the playerbases from 3 different servers were merged into 1. This has caused a lot of players to experience random disconnects from the server, multiple people from a match getting disconnected out of nowhere, or the server directly crashing, causing the match to shut down entirely, on top of random latency spikes. Obviously, some people may just have bad internet, so feel free take this whole thing with a grain of salt, but i’ve seen far enough posts on the spanish OW forums from players reporting these issues that i definitely think there’s a problem far bigger than people just “having poor internet connections”.
What do i suggest to solve these issues? Quite literally, bring at least 1 of the servers that were taken down back. Even if it’s really not that great of a server, I’ll gladly take 60 ping and good communication than a 110 ms clown fiesta.
I also want everyone to know that I love this game, and i don’t think i’ll ever be able to quit, but it makes me super sad that everyone in the South American servers has had to deal with this much stuff that has gone practically unnoticed for an entire year, on top of dealing with all the issues the game itself is having right now.
Even if nothing is done about this, the purpose of the post is to bring this whole situation to light, in a more active forum.
I thank everyone that actually took the time to read this massive text wall.
That’s all.
I live in the Caribbean and i get 80-120 ping despite being so close to Miami. The closest server to me is in Chicago. I seriously dont understand why blizzard expects overwatch to be this hugely competitive thing yet refuse to acknowledge the ping that players play on as if its not a factor, and brushing over the fact that theyre losing entire servers