Why has Blizz decided that linking OCE realms to NA realms for M+ is a great idea? Many times more than 50% of the dungs listed are OCE and I know my fps will suffer if I apply to those runs. Even when I list my own key, many who apply are OCE. What’s up with this Blizz?
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I dunno, maybe OCE people want to play the game too?
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Fwiw, oce is the only region that skews alliance on the top end. 
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I don’t mind players outside of NA at all. However, the latency can be a bit of a barrier. I don’t think it’s good for a M+ dungeon group to have people with high latency in the group, one way or the other.
I’m not sure how Blizzard can solve this problem without going full Google and investing in infrastructure. If you wanna add $1 a month to our sub fee on the promise that you’ll lay a dedicated WoW traffic only network cable across the ocean floor… I’m down. The more players the merrier!
Missed opportunity for an April fools joke 
Do you dispute that? I’m not saying there aren’t competitive alliance in other regions, just that alliance is THE competitive faction there.
No sorry, you misunderstand. It’s amusing to me that this is the case… and thanks, OCE, for representing Alliance! 
???
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Latency/fps. If the tank’s OCE and lead, their realm determines the quality I have to play in.
Just a correction, but playing with OCE as NA does not interfere with FPS. It might effect your latency/ping though. There are a few servers that are OCE and NA, like Frostmourne. If you look up the player on RIO, it will tell you which Frostmourne they are in.
Most OCE servers give me around 80-150 latency, but some will be closer to 300-350.
M+ is more than playable on latency between Aus/NZ and the US, and plenty of players in the Oceania region play on US servers. Even 1 second cast/reaction time mechanics can and should be reliably handled, and that’s about as far as anything in the game gets.
Small caveat to add. Latency should not not itself affect FPS, but latency, or unstable networks (packet loss, jitter) can cause issues that are observably similar to, or feel like playing with lowered/unstable FPS, even though your FPS is fine.
What is this based on? I’ve basically only grouped with Frostmourne players (it’s huge compared to the other OCE servers), and similar to you I almost always get ~100ms which is annoying but totally playable, but every now and then I get a rare group with 400ms+ and it’s a complete disaster.
I’m not so sure this is true. I realize people play on either, but I don’t think it’s super playable. I joined an OCE on an alt during WoW Classic because a friend played there and I wanted to hang out. It was fine enough for leveling but it was definitely a more difficult experience, and that was with Classic’s slower mechanics.
M+ requires a lot tighter reaction time, at least for higher groups. I wouldn’t call it unplayable, but certainly undesirable. It’s been a while since I’ve played in an OCE group (BfA) but back then it was definitely more challenging than playing in an NA group. Given how my experience with Classic was, I wouldn’t expect this to change in the 2 years or so it’s been since my last experience.
Still, if you want to contend that this is fine, it’s easy enough to test. We can always go join an OCE group together, I’ll happily heal you and we can see how it plays. I’d happily be wrong in this regard, I’m all for a more connected WoW. Just not at the expense of a solid gameplay experience.
Usually it’s an ISP thing, either from a player’s end, or how traffic from Blizzard’s servers gets to a player.
The Southern Cross Cable is usually the most reliable way traffic flows. From where I live in NZ, anything to LA is almost guaranteed to go through there. Aside from maybe 1-2 outages in the last 5 or so years (for half a day ish), it’s fairly consistent Occasionally, for whatever reason, like maybe a link TO the endpoint that connects into the Southern Cross Cable is having issues from the US side, traffic between, say, West Coast US and Aus gets routed around the Pacific Rim instead, in a chain of networks and ISPs, e.g. US → Japan → Taiwan → Singapore or Phillipines → Indonesia → Australia. Obviously, this compounds on inefficiencies, and any infrastructure issue on any step of the process can worsen the whole chain.
I have no idea what specific trouble you were having with Classic, or what Mythic+ mechanic you think is too tight to handle.
I live in NZ, and play on a US server. There’s no mechanics, no cast, no ground effect, nothing in M+ or any M+ season since M+ has existed that has a reaction time of <1 second, or so tight it would pose a problem with anywhere from 150-400ms. If Echelon targets you with Blood Torrent, you have time to dodge the initial hit. If Millificent chooses you as one of the laser targets, you have time to line it up and get out of the damage before it fires. If Doctor Ickus chooses to jump on you, there’s enough time to get out of the initial jump circle, and dodge the waves coming out even if you’re standing at the exact angle one of them is radiating out in. If a Cannon on Hooktail is on your exact spot, you can move out. There’s even enough time to see that there’s 2 connected Cannon swirlies and go right instead of left, or whatever.
If there’s something you can think of that comes to mind, I can probably tell you what it’s like to handle it with NZ → US latency.
IDK where “playable” but “undesirable” comes in on anything like this. Either you can dodge stuff and handle it, or you can’t and things are perfectly playable or desirable. There isn’t really much of a middle ground. Spell buffering usually takes care of making sure to minimise any input lag between spells or between gcd’s, so actual damage performance and stuff like that also shouldn’t be that significantly affected.
Incidentally, I was doing 25-man raiding back in the BC days until Warlords. The internet was MUCH worse then, because things were either ADSL or Wireless (so lots of potential for packet loss and other things) compared to now when Fibre is fairly prevalent, and latency was normally in the 500-600ms range back then. I was STILL generally able to handle things like interrupting a 1-1.5 second cast like Arcanotron or Cho’gall adds, react to Defile on Lich King which was a <1 second reaction window or you’d wipe the raid, and from an information PoV, there’s a lot more activity going on in a 25-man raid than there is in a 5-man. So on just about every factor possible, there’s really no world where things should be problematic for just about any situation that comes up in M+.
In fact, the biggest issue back then was mostly around specific boss fights. When starting Gormok or Thorim, there were a huge number of “spectator” mobs that used to activate, that weren’t a part of the fight at all, just background dressing. That had a 50% chance to instnatly disconnect a player by overloading a lot of information at once out-of-sequence, but it wasn’t even exclusive to Aus/NZ. Canadian players were affected by that too. US players in an area with bad infrastrcture probably were too. Nothing like that has existed in the game in the last … at least 6 years, and definitely not in any 5-man setting. I don’t even know if it WOULD disconnect or cause issues for players now.
Of course, if a player is actually rubber banding, having 1 sec freezes, stuff like that, yeah things are gonna be unplayable. But there’s a lot more going on in that scenario than just “There’s an OCE player in my group”.
Lucky. I play on a mobile connection and I generally play at 97ish ms, which is totally fine. If I find myself in an oce group, I’m consistently 350-450 with a 50ms jitter.
I’ll never understand the campaign to tell others to join groups they don’t want to join.
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Yikes that is bad. Most I feel like I am generally okay with the OCE-Frostmourne. Obviously the US-Frostmourne isnt an issue. I think there’s a server based in Australia that gives me major lag understandably. I had one run with 1000+ and as a tank that is no good.
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I was getting roughly a half second observable cast delay on spells, so I’d guess I was closer to the 400ms latency end of the spectrum. I’m Canadian and was living in Alberta at the time, though I live in BC now. It was fine because I was questing and could play around it, but in M+ when I would need to react to things, it seems reasonable to argue that a half second delay would mean a tank death.
Past that, all we’re doing is comparing our relative experiences and trying to convince each other that we are right. This doesn’t really serve any purpose. As I said, this isn’t an argument… I don’t need you to agree with me and am happy to be wrong here. You said you’re in NZ, do you have any +15 or higher capable characters on OCE realms? It would be easy for us to just make a group and play. If not, I can go try joining a couple of OCE groups (assuming they’ll let me in) and record my runs.
I’m away starting tomorrow for about a week. I’ll reach out when I’m back 
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I doubt it. It might take a bit of adjusting, but just about any interrupt/ground mechanic I can think of should be handle-able, and reacting to tank damage or bursts is something I’ve never come across an issue with. That’s why I tried to go into specific examples of what you think might be hard to handle. If anything, given raids tend to be worse in that regard, what with a slew of raid bosses or trash that literally 2-shot or instagib tanks as a core mechanic, M+ is much easier.
But of course, with the nature of M+, any player is perfectly free to “avoid” groups from players on Oceanic realms.
No, I don’t have any chars on OCE realms. But I’m not sure what that necessarily proves. Unless the contending idea is that NA players have “worse” latency to OCE than OCE players to NA servers*, or that NA players are less capable of handling the same latency that OCE players not only can deal with on the regular**, but also literally had no choice about, back when OCE servers didn’t even exist, and could still perform, the conditions are the same.
*which frankly isn’t an OCE-related problem, or an OCE player’s “fault”, but entirely local infrastructure or ISP issues on the NA player’s part. Providing it’s an actual thing of course.
**Given demographics, I’m fairly confident that there are more Oceanic players who are playing/pugging into a group with a leader on an NA-based realm than there are NA players pugging into a group with an OCE-based leader.
I think it may be helpful to disconnect from the idea of proof.
This discussion started because OCE players and NA players are being connected in groups for M+ without it being obvious what region they’re playing in. I pointed out that while it’s great that more players are being connected, the experience of playing on a realm outside your region can often be detrimental to the group’s success based on my past experiences. You, correctly so, challenged that to say that your own experience does not align with that.
The appropriate next step would be for me to recognize that my experience may be out of date and follow up on that before proceeding further. It’s not about me being right or you being right. Our experiences are our own but I need to check mine before making any further statements.
Also let’s be clear here. I realize that OCE players have had the crappy end of things for quite some time. I played with several folks from Australia back in Vanilla and they made do, but it definitely wasn’t ideal for them. We don’t all have to suffer here, but if we’re going to be potentially connected to groups that could have a detrimental impact on our network performance, it might be good to advertise that in a way that players can make an informed decision prior to joining a group. Currently, the only advertisement along this line is player driven, either by specifically advertising “OCE” in your groups or by looking up their realm to identify their region.
FWIW, I’m not meaning that in an argumentative way. Maybe demonstrate, or find out, would have been better.
All I’m saying there is that when connecting to a US realm from either Aus or NZ, we’re dealing with both sending traffic from OCE to NA, as well as handling traffic coming back from NA to OCE. A player on an NA realm is effectively just going through the inverse of that, barring small variances in location, e.g. if you’re in say Quebec or Newfie connecting to an LA-based realm, that realm is probably acting as more of a middle ground between the two locations (eastern Canada and Aus/NZ). An East Coast player connecting to Australia is probably having a worse experience than a NZ player connecting to LA, but there are other NZ players connecting to East Coast realms as well, so SOMEONE is dealing with THAT inverse too.
I think that’s the key distinction. Is it actually “suffering”? Sure, people would prefer not to play with 200ms if they can “choose” to play with 50ms, but the former is hardly something that should cause wipes/20% damage loss, or anything like that, so I can’t see a world where it’s actually “suffering”, or “detrimental impact”.
IDK, I’d probably think people finding groups or players with a language barrier to be a much bigger hindrance, and that’s still problematic if it’s just an excuse to simply let people “boycott BR realms” or “Avoid Indonesian players” or something. At the very least, we can’t be naive enough to pretend it won’t mostly just be a way for NA players to tailor things to themselves, at the expense of making it worse for any other regions/servers, because that’s how the demographics work. If Blizzard even remotely thought it’d be sustainable to section off OCE players, they’d have already done it. Blizzard making it easier for players to segregate off regions is just them pretending they haven’t been involved in enabling it.
I’m not tech savvy enough to understand the exact cause of something like this, but over the course of 4 different machines and 3 different ISPs, this has been my experience nearly every time I join an OCE group. My latency climbs to 1000-1500 ms and the game goes into slide show mode.
While I recognize this isn’t the normal behavior for NA to OCE, and that something is going wrong along the way, unfortunately the quickest and easiest fix for me is to avoid joining those groups.
(If you, or anyone else for that matter, happens to know what the actual cause of this is I would love to know)
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