Do I roll NA or EU?

[Lu_woo]

Question in the title - I can't decide which servers to play in.

I live in London so naturally I would consider rolling EU so I can get groups when questing and BGs during European day/evening times.

However, 75% of the time I play around 9-11pm which translates to 4-6pm EDT (I think that's the timezone for most US twinks?). Sometimes earlier, sometimes later. When playing on Lightbringer during these times, I ended up playing with a lot of US people. That prompted me to think that there is some overlap between me and them.

Normally, I wouldn't worry about it and roll EU. But I also remember/know that the US twink base is larger and arguably more organised - all the more reason to consider rolling in US servers and potentially not being able to play during odd EU times.

Thoughts?

 

[hom]

I'd test out what kind of latency you have using american servers.

If you like playing melee and the latency is high you may have some difficulty.

 

[Skeezin]

i played on us for like 6 years ping from uk is decent i only got like 100-125

 

[Symandria]

Sounds like in your particular case US might be better, assuming the latency is under 300. If you plan to do highly competitive things even 300, might be high, but for most things it should be fine : )

 

[Lu_woo]

Thanks for replies so far - seems like most people are concerned about latency. How can I test that before buying a US sub? Or how does it work?

I am still concerned about population - will I get enough ppl online at my time to do questing/dungeons? Did I get the timezone difference right?

Thanks in advance

 

[Oldpunk]

I played on both. Moved from EU zone to Oceanic after WotLK and ping time noticeably worse to get to EU so switched to US wow.

Side note - personal opinion, socially speaking EU > US. Unless you like to hear all day "anal blah/your mama blah/suk my dik blah/uninformed-but-fervently-held political opinions blah/chemtrails paranoia blah". You get this in EU too ofc, but there it's intermittent - on my US realm it's incessant. Since I'm F2P I don't need trade chat so eventually I just muted trade & general, and the game became quiet and peaceful.

 

[tomxoqt]

Are certain servers better for East coast or West Coast? I am moving to Oregon I 2 years though I live in the UK now, so I'm thinking of just rolling US in advance

 

[Lu_woo]

I played on both. Moved from EU zone to Oceanic after WotLK and ping time noticeably worse to get to EU so switched to US wow.

Side note - personal opinion, socially speaking EU > US. Unless you like to hear all day "anal blah/your mama blah/suk my dik blah/uninformed-but-fervently-held political opinions blah/chemtrails paranoia blah". You get this in EU too ofc, but there it's intermittent - on my US realm it's incessant. Since I'm F2P I don't need trade chat so eventually I just muted trade & general, and the game became quiet and peaceful.

As long as enough people are actually playing I couldn't care less. Played with enough US guys to date so should be fine

 

[Sin'dor]

Thanks for replies so far - seems like most people are concerned about latency. How can I test that before buying a US sub? Or how does it work?

In the "old days" you could literally ping the IP-address of a realm to get the latency... but they eventually needed to lock that down.

Your best bet now would be to create characters on realms at each of the four relevant "datacenters", and then check the latency in-game (by mousing-over the system-menu icon).

I'd recommend the "least-populous" realm at each datacenter (to minimize extraneous performance variables), and then running the character to a faction-capital (to prevent Cross-Realm Zoning) before performing your "tests".

(Also... to test the region where you don't already have an account, you can just create a free "Starter Edition" trial account.)

To save you the trouble of researching, here's the least-populous realm at each datacenter:

Eitrigg-EU Lordaeron-EU Ravenholdt-US Garrosh-US

[TD2]Paris Datacenter:
Frankfurt Datacenter:
Chicago Datacenter:
Los Angeles Datacenter: [/TD2]

Good luck!

Are certain servers better for East coast or West Coast? I am moving to Oregon I 2 years though I live in the UK now, so I'm thinking of just rolling US in advance

It's not game-breaking, but from Oregon specifically you'd be better-off on a Los Angeles realm.

 

[Lu_woo]

I'd recommend the "least-populous" realm at each datacenter (to minimize extraneous performance variables), and then running the character to a faction-capital (to prevent Cross-Realm Zoning) before performing your "tests".

To save you the trouble of researching, here's the least-populous realm at each datacenter:

Eitrigg-EU Lordaeron-EU Ravenholdt-US Garrosh-US

[TD2]Paris Datacenter:
Frankfurt Datacenter:
Chicago Datacenter:
Los Angeles Datacenter: [/TD2]

Thanks mate. I am assuming classic will have battlegroup bgs? So as long as I'm in the same battlegroup as most twinks, my only interest is to pick the server with lowest latency to ensure no lags when outside bgs?

 

[Sin'dor]

Thanks mate. I am assuming classic will have battlegroup bgs? So as long as I'm in the same battlegroup as most twinks, my only interest is to pick the server with lowest latency to ensure no lags when outside bgs?

That's a reasonable assumption... but since this is Blizzard™ we're talking about, you can't really predict what kinds of bizarre changes they may come up with when implementing the logistical infrastructure for Classic.

For example, it's possible that all of your latency-tests and time-sheduling will show that a Chicago realm would be "perfect" for you... so you go-ahead and purchase a US account and start making characters. Then it turns-out that Classic is unable to maintain those legendary "60-hour Alterac Valley battles" of legend, and Blizzard™ decides to consolidate all the US battlegroups onto a single server in Los Angeles... and your latency becomes unplayable.

...or not. Who knows? Just make the best decisions that you can at the moment, and hopefully everything will work out.