Server Connection Information

I am responsible for coordinating with several guilds/friends to ensure we all end up on the same server. Some concerns have risen like “I don’t want to play CST servers because my east coast ping to west coast data centers is 70+”. So my question is aimed at you folks that know about data centers, and how connections can be routed.

Short version: is it possible to log in to a PST/West Coast server, while connected to the Chicago data center?

If this is possible, then choosing a PST server will have no negative impacts for everyone. If this is not possible, and connections to PST servers requires an east coast player to route their connection all the way across the country, this would make PST servers less desirable to about 1/3 the country.

Myself and some friends have tested connections to the data centers using the below addresses.

137.221.105.2 (US West) located in LA.
24.105.62.129 (US Central) located in Chicago.

I would like my connection routed through the one closest to me, along with all my friends around the US so we can all enjoy the same server with relatively low pings, but if this is not possible, the US Central (or on the blue post its listed as East) servers would be more accessible to everyone at a more consistently low ping.

Thanks for your time. I hope someone can share some insight on this!

You might want to check out the new Party Sync mode that’s coming with the next patch. It’s built to bring parties together better basically.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/8-2-5-ptr-development-notes/237019

As for choosing specific servers, time zones etc, I don’t think that’s how it’s going to work, nor should it really matter in the long run.

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I live on the East Coast and see no noticeable difference between playing on West Coast or Chicago servers but I am just a couple of hops away from transcontinental backbone fiber and the hops are high quality.

So i can’t vouch for the accuracy of everything on this page, you might want to verify the server before you pick. But this is a generally accurate list of the location and server time zone of all the servers. https://wow.gamepedia.com/Americas_region_realm_list_by_datacenter

Just to clarify how it works. Your ping to the server is determined solely by the server location - Chicago or LA. The time you see in game is just a time zone blizzard chose for that server. There are servers in Chicago that are set to display pst in game.

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Yeah no that wowpedia list isn’t accurate.

The IP addresses aren’t static and haven’t been for years. Instead an IP is picked out of a pool of IP addresses when you connect to your realm.

Only two ip addresses are used for North America. One for each data center. IP routing ends at the data center. It no longer carries through the data center to individual computers.

137.221.105.2 (US West)
24.105.62.129 (US Central)

Those are gateways into blizzards network , not the actual IP addresses for the servers you connect to.

well yes but the IP addresses they list aren’t relevant to us, all we care about is if the locations and time zones listed are correct. i would assume all of those locations are right but maybe not the time zones.

The NA realms physically are in Chicago and Los Angles, with the Oceanic ones in Australia. The time zones of the realms is really irrelevant as most events are done from Pacific time.

The realm list would tell you what realms are in which data center. If you are on the east coast, the Chicago data center usually has the fastest ping. Los Angeles is usually fastest for the West Coast.

If you are doing dungeons and raids, you normally are instanced in the data center of the group leader. What this means is that if you are doing randoms you are more likely to be instanced in Australia if you do them early in the morning, and instanced in NA if you do them in the evening. If you do dungeons and raids from just your guild, you would be instanced in your realm’s data center.

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They are the only IP’s Blizzard tells people to use for connection issues.

The days of one realm being on one piece of physical hardware with it’s own external ip are long gone. Once your traffic hits the data center it’s routed via internal network variable ip’s, not public static ip’s.

What you get routed to is not a full representation of wow. It is more like the control piece that manages common resources and crz/sharding for your “virtual” realm. The things it manages for you to play wow do not all have to be on the same hardware.

Even zones/realms that do not change with crz/shards may change their physical location when the network reboots after maintenance.

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I’m not sure what you mean by being “connected” to Chicago but logged in elsewhere. I’m pretty sure you can’t, in which case the rest of what I’m going to say here is irrelevant anyway.

The thing is that even if you were somehow connected to something at Chicago, but playing on a server physically located on the west coast, then the data still has to get between Chicago and the west coast, so the overall time for the data to get there is going to be the same, even if the thing where you’re measuring ping is in Chicago. Just because it’s all Blizzard’s equipment in that case doesn’t mean they get to ignore the speed of light.

I suppose it’s possible that Blizzard’s internal network has slightly fewer hops or faster links than if you go from wherever you are to the west coast via the public Internet, but in most cases I doubt that’s going to be the most significant factor. I could be wrong, haven’t done Internet engineering in a while. You might want to ask this over in tech support, though.

And as other people have pointed out, Blizzard is going to move your data around internally in ways you can’t control no matter what data center holds the IP you are connected to at any given time.

I suspect, but don’t know (and I bet they do know over in tech support) that unless you are on a different continent, the quality of your connection to your local ISP is going to be far more important than which data center your server is in.

If this has already been mentioned, my apologies but both data centers have realms for all time zones if that’s what you were asking here…

[quote=“Daventon-garona, post:11, topic:247184”]possible to
log in to a PST/West Coast server, while connected to the Chicago data center?
[/quote]