High latency to the South East Asian servers is an issue that has been talked about constantly for the past year or so. Here’s a couple of posts making this clear (keeping in mind that these are only 2 of the hundreds of similar posts). Pay attention to the amount of sympathetic comments and the upvotes to the posts.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4tah8i/i_need_your_help_roverwatch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/6puq9m/serious_please_help_us_roverwatch/

There are 2 main issues that I can determine myself.

The first is the routing.

I opened a training range lobby and looked up the IP to make sure it was in Singapore then ran a traceroute against that IP. Here it is:

Tracing route to ec2-52-221-246-193.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com [52.221.246.193] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.100.1 2 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 58-65-175-242.nayatel.pk [58.65.175.242] 3 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 115-186-154-166.nayatel.pk [115.186.154.166] 4 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 58-65-175-70.nayatel.pk [58.65.175.70] 5 4 ms 4 ms 3 ms 58-65-175-81.nayatel.pk [58.65.175.81] 6 13 ms 10 ms 7 ms rwp44.pie.net.pk [221.120.237.101] 7 35 ms 35 ms 35 ms static-khi275-P01-pie.net.pk [221.120.254.14] 8 32 ms 35 ms 35 ms static.khi77.pie.net.pk [202.125.128.150] 9 134 ms 144 ms 144 ms xe2-0-0.catania7.cat.seabone.net [93.186.129.214] 10 373 ms * 311 ms ae14.singapore2.sin.seabone.net [195.22.197.27] 11 186 ms 184 ms 185 ms 38895.sgw.equinix.com [27.111.228.215] 12 * * * Request timed out. 13 * * * Request timed out. 14 183 ms 184 ms 183 ms 52.93.10.33 15 183 ms 182 ms 183 ms 52.93.8.169 16 186 ms 183 ms 183 ms 52.93.8.124 17 199 ms 199 ms 199 ms 52.93.11.11 18 188 ms 188 ms 188 ms 52.93.11.10 19 191 ms 191 ms 191 ms 52.93.8.137 20 205 ms 205 ms 205 ms 52.93.10.73 21 * * * Request timed out. 22 * * * Request timed out. 23 * * * Request timed out. 24 * * * Request timed out. 25 * * * Request timed out. 26 * * * Request timed out. 27 * * * Request timed out. 28 * * * Request timed out. 29 * * * Request timed out. 30 * * * Request timed out. Trace complete.

By looking up the destinations from the hops, you can see that from where I am in Pakistan, the route goes through Catania in Italy, THEN to Singapore, which is absolutely confusing to me.

By contrast, here’s a traceroute I ran to Valve Singaporean servers

Tracing route to sgp-2.valve.net [103.10.124.1] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 <1 ms 2 ms <1 ms 192.168.100.1 2 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 58-65-175-242.nayatel.pk [58.65.175.242] 3 4 ms 3 ms 4 ms 115-186-154-166.nayatel.pk [115.186.154.166] 4 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 58-65-175-70.nayatel.pk [58.65.175.70] 5 4 ms 3 ms 4 ms 58-65-175-81.nayatel.pk [58.65.175.81] 6 6 ms 7 ms 7 ms rwp44.pie.net.pk [221.120.237.101] 7 31 ms 30 ms 31 ms static-khi275-P01-pie.net.pk [221.120.254.14] 8 32 ms 32 ms 31 ms static.khi77.pie.net.pk [202.125.128.135] 9 109 ms 111 ms 106 ms KHIEQU.pie.net.pk [202.125.129.218] 10 111 ms 109 ms 111 ms 32590.sgw.equinix.com [27.111.228.176] 11 107 ms 106 ms 107 ms sgp-2.valve.net [103.10.124.1] Trace complete.

This is how the routing should be, in theory. But it isn’t. I thought it may be an ISP problem, so I asked my ISP about the huge contrast in the routing. Their response was as following:

Answer of your question is that destination end server didn’t advertise their routes to Pakistan gateways once they can advertise their pools to GWs all traffic from Pakistan will get optimal ping. There is nothing related with NAYAtel [my ISP] in this regard.

To me it’s obvious that as players, this is out of our hands. There may be some collaboration required between Blizzard and the companies that provide their networking backbone, but the end result would benefit thousands of players, if not more.

The second issue is that people in Singapore, Australia and other similar regions often get matchmade with each other, meaning one match they might have optimal ping but in the next they’ll might get something upwards of 200ms. Sometimes Australian players even get placed in US West servers. An easy way to solve this would be to completely separate the regions instead of keeping them under the common name of “Americas”. But despite all the complaints, nothing has been done about this either.

In conclusion, my message to the developers, on behalf of the South East Asian Overwatch community, is that we beg of you to solve these issues once and for all, so we can have a smooth and enjoyable gameplay experience. Having to play the game we love while facing these major connectivity issues is undoubtedly frustrating and disrupts the experience, when you find yourself constantly thinking “These shots really should be hitting” or “How did he kill me behind a wall?”

Thank you all very much.