Over the last few weeks, there had been issues that Australian and New Zealand Overwatch players were facing when trying to play Overwatch on PC. In some instances, these players are getting routed directly to the US servers instead of our local servers which is obviously causing some issues with gameplay. Blizzard have assured us that it doesn’t appear to be happening on PS4 and Xbox One. Unfortunately they don’t know what it causing it at this stage and can’t provide a timeframe for it being fixed. A Blue post on the Overwatch forum reads as follows:
“Hey everyone,
Thanks so much for the reports. After really digging into this over the weekend, we’ve been able to confirm that there is indeed an issue preventing some players in the Americas region from being matched into local servers—specifically those near/around Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil. This is currently only affecting PC players (our local servers for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One appear to be working fine) and, while we don’t yet know why this is happening, we can see that the problem became much more noticeable last Thursday.
We’re still investigating possible causes, so we don’t have a solid ETA on when everything will get back to normal. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to identify the bug and implement a permanent solution this week, but we’ll be trying out some things over the next few days that may improve your experience for a short time. This would only be a temporary band-aid, though; our biggest priority is to find a fix that addresses the problem at its source.
We’re super sorry for the inconvenience, and we’ll be sure to update everyone as soon as we make any sort of major progress. Thanks again for letting us know something was wrong, and most of all for your continued support.”
Considering that this fix is something that would help non-American players, don’t expect it to come anytime soon. Blizzard has a history of not caring about the non-American and non-Chinese player bases. After all, it took 10 years for Australia to get local servers for World of Warcraft, so a fix for the Oceanic area of Overwatch players will come sometime in 2050.
