World of Warcraft Finally Gets Dedicated Australian Server

You know, there’s a lot of talk about video games as a corrupting agent in our lives, turning us into worse people: more prone to violence, foul language, bigotry, etc.   One of the principle fears is that Gaming is making people more racist because in just about every modern shooter, you’re playing a white guy shooting up minorities—Muslims, Chinese, Africans, South Americans, ect…

Well, it’s true that gaming makes people racist, but not against Muslims: no, ask any online gamer what race they hate the most and they’ll likely tell you Australians.  Australians are infamous for being pretty much impossible to play online with because their less-than-stellar internet combined with their distance from worldwide servers.  It means that an Australian with a good internet connection might get 150 ping on a great day, while on average the number is much worse than that.  Ping like that can make gaming extremely difficult.

Well, while there’s no universal fix yet, Blizzard at the very least is finally giving Australian’s what they want and is releasing a dedicated Australian server for the good ol’ down under.  While there was a dedicated Oceanic Server before recently, it was still rather dodgy for the Australian gamer—so that server and all the gamers who are on it are being transferred right to the mainland.  That should give Australian players and any who migrate there (Migration will be free for a limited time after the October 28^th launch for Australians on US servers) a much better gaming experience… while any outsiders who migrate there will get to experience what it’s like to be the dreaded Australian for once.

Still, since there’s a lot of cross-server action, it means many of the other advantages players had going up against the Oceanic server will be eliminated, and things will be a wee bit more competitive, at least in PvP.  It’s a shame this update was 10 years in the making and it couldn’t come sooner, but with World of Warcraft subscription numbers on the rise (thanks to that new expansion, I wager) it’s as good a time as ever to release.