Because i live in Virginia, which is EST, and i was wondering which realm i should honestly stay at. Like is there more or less lag depending on what data center you choose, does it matter? What realms have the best data centers for Virginia or for the East Coast of the US?
Does any of them make a difference and is it significant?
Not really much choice anymore. Last I checked Blizzard had data centers in Chicago and Los Angeles.
I live in Montana, and the mountain time zone doesn’t even have a data center. I’ve got toons on realms in all the other major North American time zones, though, and I’ve really never noticed any significant differences. I do have to remember which realm is in which time zone, for scheduling purposes, but that’s about it.
I think too many hours of difference between player and realm could possibly make raid times and such more problematic, if folks need to schedule around family and work commitments, but that’s doable.
I live in Europe, and play on the Cali datacenter. I have no visible lag. I think it’s like 120ms?
Unless your local internet is potato per hour, you should be fine anywhere.
I live in Va to. About all you can do is to play on est zone realms i guess. Although I thought they had a data Center in New York once upon a time.
It can matter, but probably won’t. It depends on your internet service provider, upload / download speeds, etc.
I would say if you’re considering a server, just make a toon on it real fast and check the ping for yourself. It should show up in the bottom-right hand corner area.
If you have a good Internet, probably won’t make much of a difference.
If you don’t have a high speed Internet, try for the one closest to you.
Otherwise it’s basically for time zone stuff. Easier to find a guild/people to do things with if they are in or close to in your same time zone.
For example I’m west coast so 3 hours behind east coast. I go to play on an east coast server in the evening… Most people are zzzzzing. lol And you are up 3 hours before me… So it can be a bit of a timing issue.
However the actual server location is I think only Irvine and Chicago at this time. Used to also be Arizona (I think?) and Texas somewhere. Also was it Boston? Ugh, not sure. I think they moved them though so now only 2 locations anyway.
Me too! 
Not really , if you play on say Proudmoore which is a PST realm and you join a guild their raid hours might not work for you because of the time difference
For average content…doesn’t matter.
PvPing? I’d stick to the closest data center.
On an average day I am 5-15ms on a local data center…
Also time matters…if you are PST, and play on PST servers, your ping will be lower than playing on CST servers…that are still based in LA servers…why that is? Who knows…maybe to make this players feel like they don’t have a disadvantage?
Bottom line if you want a good connection…look up your closest data center, and pick a server in your time zone…they will always provide you with the lowest ping.
If you aren’t PvPing…I would say pick anything in your region, the ping might shoot up by like 20-50,it won’t compromize your average gameplay at all.
the biggest impact on your ping these days is going to come from your local infrastructure, not the distance to the datacenter. I know people who live in europe and the middle east who play on US servers with next to zero lag using a potato, I know people who live in some of the… less popular… american cities who get massive lag despite having great hardware.
(sometimes can even be a single transfer point causing the problems, back when I played eve I suddenly started getting massive lag, a little bit of route tracing showed it was coming from a single transfer point, so contacted my provider and asked to have my IP rerouted because it was causing “work issues” they did, and boom problem solved)