It used to be, if you were leader and queued an arena from an east coast server you got an instance that was also in the east coast datacenter. I’ve been busy playing classic the last few months but I just got back on retail and started queueing games from kel’thuzad and am clearly getting back to back west coast arena instances?
Do we not get to control what datacenter we play at anymore? I don’t think I can keep playing retail arena if that’s the case, not because it has a huge impact on performance or the outcome of the game, west coast ping just feels awful to play with for me. It’s really frustrating and saddening to see.
east coast servers aint existed since like. late mop? maybe wod
new york and phoenix datacenters got moved to chicago and los angeles dude
far as i know the first person to load into an arena from either side is the datacenter, though. if you want to control that, get an SSD and hit join battle asap every game
I get 18 ms on kt and 70 ms on LA. Chicago, compared to LA is relatively speaking the east most server.
It’s definitely not loading in, I just queued a game with 2/3 people from KT, both people clicked join arena and loaded in before the tich player clicked join (I asked him to delay for about 10s just to be safe) and it was still west coast datacenter ping.
Also weird that when the proper east coast servers went away I went from 18 ms to 36 (from toronto), then recently in legion I went back down to 18 home, as if the new york servers returned without any announcement? I don’t really care about this though. I’m just concerned with getting my home server ping in arena consistently.
sounds like someone on the enemy team is west coast and was faster than you or your teammate from kt
Well if thats how it works now that’s super unfortunate because ultimately that means I have no real control over the datacenter. But I’m 100% certain that as recent as a few months ago, if I was leader and queueing I’d always get the datacenter I queued from. Is there any record of this changing?
maybe i’m missing something; how would it ever have been possible for two teams to match up with both of their leaders getting different arena instances in different datacenters? that’s why i said get an ssd; if it was just who on the team joins first, you could just tell your team not to jump the gun. if it’s who begins to load all the way in first, you can control it by loading faster than the enemy.
Typically the way it used to work is if you queued as a leader from east coast you’d only queue into other groups with east coast leaders. Lead has 100% consistently decided the datacenter for years.
i would bet quite a bit that battlegroups being dissolved for a ladder covering all of NA and australia was an attempt to stem some pvp participation bleeding that was on its way to making that an inviable system, and they may well have left it preferring matched datacenters for some time after mop made that change, but there’s absolutely no way in hell this crap game has retained enough people for that to have been true at least since legion. everybody at every mmr has noticed how much more common ladder series are than they used to be in mop and wod. i can’t tell you how long ago it stopped working the way you describe, but it definitely isn’t that way anymore
Super depressing, thanks for the input though, I appreciate it.
Seems like not many people pay attention to this sort of thing. Oh well, I think it’s really important.
np, sorry the news isn’t better.
I noticed the same thing with BG’s. I often play early morning and for all of BfA I have been getting put into Oceanic BG’s where my ping is 350. I didn’t realize this was happening and thought I had an internet issue. I even posted about it in the tech help forum and the blue told me to get a new router and do all of this troubleshooting on my home network. Wasted a bunch of time until a player explained what was happening and i looked and noticed 90% of my BG was Frosmourne in the mornings. Game is just super dead and can’t match players with others from the same region.
I’m pretty certain the difference between 15ms and 70ms isn’t affecting your gameplay. Anything sub 100ms is indistinguishable, you’ll notice spell batching being an issue before you notice ping with those numbers.
In times when you feel like “wtf I landed that kick,” your probably encountering spell batching and not ping issues, unless you were from eu/asia/aus with 200+ ms
Great, I need AP, the right traits, right stats, right class, right comp, and now I need to worry about my data centers.
WHEN WILL THE GRIND END??
It’s pretty easy to feel the difference between 15 ms when you’re used to it and like 80 ms. It’s not losing me games but it’s definitely noticeable and feels slightly worse to play on. I play on a super low spell queue window because it feels better to me (about 53 ms queue usually) but I actually have to adjust it based on the datacenter im in or its super noticable.
If you think 70 isn’t noticeable I’d recommend lowering your spell queue then checking again.