WTF Maintenance during Aussie prime time?

[Helli]

This is good advice.

@OP, every MMO Aussies play has this problem. BLizzard once tried to open a server farm for WOW in Australia but gave up due to the horrible market conditions and restrictions your government and the Australian ISP industry demanded. Blame them not MMO companies for the fact you don't get local servers.

This is very outdated and also not very factual information. In fact there is one ISP that has continuously invited Blizzard to open servers in Australia, with Blizzard totally ignoring them (Internode). Blizzard claimed that the biggest ISP here was the roadblock (Telstra) because their infrastructure went through a single fibre-optic line in San Diego (problem with this claim is that Optus, not Telstra own that line). This puts a large shadow over the accuracy of Blizzard's claims. Blizzard's other claim is it is not economically viable. And in fact later, Blizzard came out and said oh wait maybe it was Optus we were talking to, we don't recall.
(source: http://delimiter.com.au/2010/11/09/a...simon-hackett/ and subsequent linked articles)

There has been servers opened in Australia by quite a number of game companies: EA games have, LOL does, and I know there are others I can't think of off the top of my head.


Regarding the suggestion we should play on Japanese servers:

Even though Japan and Australia are basically on same timezone, for a number of Australians the ping is actually way worse to Japan than to Canada, making this not feasible at all. Then there is issues like language differences making it very difficult to find a community to play with if you are non-japanese speaking unless you have a large group of friends also join the same server.