3 ms·

Sorry, it’s unlikely that Overwatch latency would improve specifically from this as I am very doubtful that it is hosted on AWS, or any cloud provider for that

Sorry, it’s unlikely that Overwatch latency would improve specifically from this as I am very doubtful that it is hosted on AWS, or any cloud provider for that matter. I worked customer support for Blizzard Europe for several years until about 2012. At the time they ran their own infrastructure co-located in ISP data centres. It was very important to Blizzard to have as much control of the quality of the user gaming experience as possible, with control of their infrastructure being a large part of this, and I would be very surprised to hear this philosophy of theirs has changed. Then again, I don’t know for sure what they’re doing these days.

dvlsg 8y ago
Not blizzard specifically, more Activision-blizzard, but the latest call of duty open beta was reportedly running on vultr for at least some of the game servers. I think they moved it back to in-house servers when it went live, though, and dropped the server rates from 60hz to 20hz. Kind of a shame, the difference was very noticeable.
bsagdiyev 8y ago
Anecdotal, but afaik Blizzard uses AWS for Overwatch in the US. A friend who works as a systems engineer told me they hit some ridiculous cap on an AWS region a few years back and it caused issues for a bit.
cthalupa 8y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6blbkj/til_that_overwatch_servers_are_named_by_airports/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6blbkj/til_that_... The comment by Bill Warnecke seems to indicate that some of the Overwatch fleet is hosted on AWS.
andkenneth 8y ago
Things must have changed. I've worked in esports in Australia, and I know that professional OW players use tools to specifically give nearby IP ranges high ping so they can play on the region of their choosing. AUS players have a jsfiddle they link around which grabs the current IP ranges for AWS so they know what to block to be able to play on NA servers. They do this because the local playerpool is much smaller, to the point where they cannot climb to very high ranks without playing overseas.

dvlsg 8y ago

Not blizzard specifically, more Activision-blizzard, but the latest call of duty open beta was reportedly running on vultr for at least some of the game servers. I think they moved it back to in-house servers when it went live, though, and dropped the server rates from 60hz to 20hz. Kind of a shame, the difference was very noticeable.

bsagdiyev 8y ago

Anecdotal, but afaik Blizzard uses AWS for Overwatch in the US. A friend who works as a systems engineer told me they hit some ridiculous cap on an AWS region a few years back and it caused issues for a bit.

cthalupa 8y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6blbkj/til_that_overwatch_servers_are_named_by_airports/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6blbkj/til_that_... The comment by Bill Warnecke seems to indicate that some of the Overwatch fleet is hosted on AWS.

andkenneth 8y ago

Things must have changed. I've worked in esports in Australia, and I know that professional OW players use tools to specifically give nearby IP ranges high ping so they can play on the region of their choosing. AUS players have a jsfiddle they link around which grabs the current IP ranges for AWS so they know what to block to be able to play on NA servers. They do this because the local playerpool is much smaller, to the point where they cannot climb to very high ranks without playing overseas.