I hear what people are saying about fricton between OCE and NA and I think it’s a multifactorial issue that isn’t easily reduced down to any one thing.
In my view the systemic isolation (longer queues, often being matched with South American players on US-Central data centers, etc.) are contributing to an overall lower skill pool in OCE for PVP specifically. I understand that this can be frustrating for NA players, but it will only get worse with time if things conttinue.
It’s already demotivating to play with higher ping than everyone (which has been a historical problem for OCE) but far worse and more damaging to the development of a region’s skill base is a (soft) forced isolationism and restriction from access to experience against better players.
We improve by playing against better players and by not being allowed to mix with the greater NA playerbase we just end up in stagnant waters. Now I’m OCE and just a casual player, I play arena only and just play enough to get duelist every season (since s15 in MoP) but never play to push beyond that for various reasons. I am good friends with many R1 players but don’t pretend to speak with any authority on anything outside of my own ‘middle bracket’ purview, and I strongly feel that OCE’s middle and lower bracket is suffering immensely on retail (and across the whole game as a whole).
I find it really depressing that OCE feels so left behind because I always have a much better experience playing on Tichondrius (US-West) than on Frostmourne (OCE) even though I’m playing on 140ms higher game latency.
If I want to pick up a new healer class after a rework or if it’s been some time and I just want to get comfortable playing that class, well I’m sitting extremely long skirmish queues and I can only really get pops during the day (and normally against the same few people, who spam play tank classes or play thousands of skirmish games but never improve.) I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that I’ve sat many HOUR LONG skirmish queues as a healer on OCE realms late at night. What am I to do in this situation?
The experience I get from playing low quality skirmishes minimal and extremely limited but I don’t want to queue a solo shuffle and just tank a lobby before getting comfortable like others have complained about. So I either don’t play, or I queue from an American server, leaving my Oceanic characterrs and the Oceanic ‘community’ worse off because now they’re down a healer who might’ve contributed to helping others who wanted to play better to get some games in.
This is such a huge problem and it stems from such an infuriatingly minor seeming decision that Blizzard made without thinking about the ramifications. We are paying customers too, please let OCE players freely queue into the NA playerbase without any additional waiting times. I don’t want to preferrentially queue into OCE players in unrated or rated games, I just want fast queues so that I can play the game. Please.
PS. I just want to add that they made a similar (and devastating) decision with arena queues in TBC classic. They made a last minute decision to totally isolate the OCE arena ladder when TBC launched (at the behest of a loud minority of PVE-only players (I personally know the thread’s author as I raided with him)) who had no intentions of engaging with competitive arena outside of the ‘PVP for PVE gear’ cycle that existed during seasons 1 and 2. This ended up spectacularly backfiring on them and there wasn’t enough MMR in the region for players to get enough rating for weapons. This lead to many other problems including collusion at the top end, and was just overall totally devastating for the region. They reversed their decision with WOTLK but why did it have to take so long? And why are things still this way on Retail?
