Diablo III gets Australian servers

Ahead of the release of Diablo III: Reaper of Souls next week, it looks like Blizzard is exploring the possibility of Australian Battle.net servers for the game.

CONFIRMED: Blizzard has confirmed Australian servers for Diablo III!

EARLIER UPDATE:
Community manager Arcagnion has posted on the Diablo III forums with an official comment – looks like what we’re seeing is “testing” at this stage (so it may disappear again), but Blizzard will keep us posted:

We are currently performing some regional testing with Diablo III and hope to have more details to share with the Australian and New Zealand community soon; stay tuned.

The publisher has remained very quiet on the topic, but early research suggests the servers are hosted in Sydney and are providing sub-100ms pings for gamers in Australia and New Zealand.

At this stage, it seems that authentication and account-keeping details are still being handled by US or South East Asian machines, but the gameplay itself is on a local server. This suggests that Blizzard is working on a server migration and avoiding major disruptions to gamers.

This is big news – we’re seeing reports of latency as low as 10-20ms, with many gamers unable to cope with the new response times. You shouldn’t need to change your character’s region, Diablo III is instead connecting to the closest (quickest) server. Here’s hoping it sticks around!

While it’s nice to think that this is a launch present for Reaper of Souls, a strong theory is that this change is actually not intended for Diablo III at all, with the click-fest dragged being used as a sort of guinea pig. Blizzard‘s MOBA game, Heroes of the Storm has entered technical alpha testing and must be eyeing a beta release in the not-so-distant future. For a fast-paced game like that, response time is super important – moreso than in a game like Diablo III, so a local server is a must.

…plus, it cannot be ignored that Heroes of the Storm is launching up against one major competitor, League of Legends, which already has a well-established Sydneyside server presence. For a competitive launch, it makes sense for Blizzard to be well-armed.