After months of “unplayable” games, the Australian Overwatch 2 player base has finally reached its limit with players angrily taking to social media this week to bring attention to an issue with latency.
Australian servers have been difficult to locate for the Oceanic OW2 community, leading to a reroute to servers based in South-East Asia. As such, player pings have sat at over 100 consistently for some time now, leading to rubberbanding and frustrating gameplay for all players involved. The issue originally reared its head as Diablo 4 arrived midway through May, but is still occurring to this day.
Players implored Blizzard to address the issue via an assortment of posts on Reddit over the past week, with June 4’s post the last straw for one player. However, the issue hasn’t gone away despite multiple pleas, with the situation not improving following news players are finding games on servers far beyond Singapore.
One player believed they’d been reaching servers as far as Japan and the west coast of the U.S. Even players from New Zealand were struggling to find a reliable Australian server, with a player claiming that only “one in 10” games had sent them to Australian servers.
Players believed that the issue stemmed from the newly released Diablo 4 taking over multiple Blizzard servers in the oceanic region, and thus left Aussie OW players struggling to find a single reliable lobby.
This lack of Australian servers ended up rallying a large portion of the community.
Previously in May, a collection of disgruntled Overwatch 2 players aimed to take the issue higher. Australian gamers suggested taking the issue to regulatory bodies like the Australian Competitive Consumer Commission (ACCC) in order to force Blizzard to take action.
Related: Overwatch 2’s ‘unplayable’ ping crisis is sending players to different continents
OW2 players also attempted to contact developers through Blizzard forums only to hear nothing in return. Now almost two months since Diablo 4’s May 15 release, there’s been no action from any entity.
The issue seems to stretch as far back as Oct. 2022, with Blizzard forums being filled with complaints from the Australian OW2 community. It seems like a fix is well-and-truly far away for the remote region.
Update July 6, 4am CT: Blizzard Entertainment claims Australian servers “are back to normal.” The devs added on the forum that custom games can be created on the server again.
