Overwatch players are fed up with the new region lock that keeps them from playing on their preferred server while putting them in games with incredibly high ping — leading to serious SR losses.
The Overwatch Crossplay patch finally introduced a highly requested feature to the game, but players were quick to discover that it also prevented them from choosing what region they wanted.
As such, there was a lot of backlash, leading to the devs commenting that players “are placed into the best match based on a variety of factors, including player skill and ping.”
However, that didn’t stop some players in North America from being matched with Koreans of all people, resulting in some wonky experiences.
“We have made a configuration change recently (post-release) that should greatly reduce the frequency of getting into matches with high ping,” the devs added.
Now, a few days later, players are once again calling for the region lock to be reverted after being put in matches where the ping is so bad it’s making it impossible to play, resulting in SR losses.
“I’m a player from South America, and just got two games on EU. Playing on NA is fine, sure the ping is high (around 200 ms for me) but on EU (350+ ) is not even close to playable,” Redditor Glackwin wrote on the Competitive Overwatch subreddit.
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“3 games now. I’m done. I lost 125 SR because the game decided that I, a South American player, should be playing on EU,” they added in an edit to the original post.
Ping issues can be incredibly problematic and being put in servers so far away can definitely create an unfair environment.
Some users have suggested that because of the amount of work that went into the update, Blizzard won’t be changing it.
“I gotta be honest, considering how much coding work has gone into the implementation of this system there is next to 0% chance of them ever reverting it,” another player wrote.
“I know it’s been a meme for a long time but the game is actually dying. Feels like they’re just experimenting for OW2 at this point,” another sadly added.
As of the June 24 patch, Blizzard has yet to address how ping issues are resulting in losses, but hopefully something is done about this soon, even if it means waiting slightly longer to find a game.
