Blizzard makes another Overwatch region lock change after ping issues

Blizzard promised to monitor the controversial region lock change in Overwatch, and in their latest change, tweaked the system to “reduce the possibility” of putting players in servers with high latency.

Overwatch’s crossplay update marked an important change for the community. It was the first time players could play with their friends on other platforms – something requested since the game first launched in 2016.

However, it brought about a controversial new change that prevented players from switching regions manually.

At first, everyone thought it was a bug because it wasn’t mentioned in the patch notes. But Blizzard confirmed it was an intended feature that is supposed to help minimize queue times and keep the average ping as low as possible.

Yet, in a bizarre twist of fate, it’s made the opposite happen in some instances. Some players have been winding up in faraway servers with high pings. So, keeping true to their word, Blizzard made another change to address the issue.

Josh Nash, the Community Manager at Blizzard, provided fans with an update on the Overwatch forums.

“We’ve made another change that should further reduce the possibility of getting into a match in a faraway data center,” he said.

However, it wasn’t enough to appease frustrated players who still want to have the option to switch regions.

“So no plans to let us switch data centers in the near future?” wrote Squirrel, a long-time member on the forum.

“This is especially important when playing late at night [and] early morning. There’s no reason to wait 15mins in [queue] only to then expand the parameters and only then be put in the current active server when you could have chosen it yourself from the start.”

Despite the ongoing backlash and criticism, Blizzard has stuck to their guns and doubled down on the new automated ‘regionless’ system.

The consensus is that it probably took a lot of work to make the change, and they don’t want to undermine it.

Either way, it seems like the new region lock system is here to stay. So, hopefully, the latest change irons out some of the problems that exist.