Overwatch Servers – Why the 14 Locations are Important

Where are the Overwatch servers? Your distance from a physical server can make a real difference to gameplay, this is where they all are.

Most live service games like Overwatch 2 survive providing a stable and competitive environment for players. Overwatch has definitely had to meet that, with players taking comp queue pretty seriously. As an online game though, there’s always more to think about than just connecting up to the server. Your distance from the Overwatch 2 servers can make just as much of a difference as your PC’s performance.

Your distance from an Overwatch server can affect your connection. Even with the top internet set-up, physical distance is unavoidable factor. Your connection to the game is pretty important for performance too. You can have the best set up with a high FPS and running the best Overwatch settings, but if you’re not communicating your inputs to the OW servers and back quickly enough, it’ll be limiting.

Outside of just knowing the Overwatch server status, it can be helpful to understand your relationship to it. That’s how far you are from the Overwatch server locations and why it impacts your gameplay through things like ping. This is how everything works and how it impacts your performance.

Overwatch Servers

Overwatch hosts tons of games for players every day, running in every region. Providing instant (or at a bit of a wait, with the queue times) games all over the world is going to mean they need to have quite a few servers running. Similar to Call of Duty servers, Overwatch’s dedicated hosts are spread out across the world. There’s a firmer weighting towards some spots on the globe which have more active overwatch players though.

Europe and North America are definitely better served by the OW servers. Your distance from these servers will determine how well you can connect to them. They add a natural roadblock to achieving a low ping, something that’s tricky to get around even with better hardware. If you want to assess how close you are, we have all of the Overwatch server locations.

Overwatch Server Status

Before checking how far you are from the Overwatch 2 servers, how can you check the performance of them as a whole? There are simple ways of checking the OW server status. Battle Net has an active server status page which you can check if you want to be sure of the server status.

Outside of that, popular sites like Down Detector are great for this too. Players can easily see what’s happening with the game's servers by checking these tools. Most of the time, the OW servers are up unless there’s a patch. So, if there’s not been any Overwatch news about updates then this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

How Many Overwatch 2 Servers Locations Are There?

Overwatch has 14 dedicated server locations as far as we know. This is quite a lot fewer locations than we’d seen with similar games like the Fortnite servers. This isn’t too surprising given the difference in player numbers. However, how underserviced certain regions are is definitely more remarkable.

The OW Server locations are concentrated in very few places. There’s a handful in North America. This is fairly normal. Then, a handful in Western Europe. There’s one in the Middle East, one in Australia, and a few in Asia. This leaves Africa South America and great parts of Europe completely overlooked. These don’t have any dedicated Overwatch server locations.

The distribution for Overwatch servers means that players will have a more difficult time to connect for quite a few locales. It won’t change the Overwatch server status. However, you’ll communicate slower to a further away server. If you’re too far from the server, it can cause issues.

All OW Servers – Overwatch Server Locations

The dedicated Overwatch 2 servers are considerably less expensive than other games. Where exactly are they located though? These are all of the confirmed Overwatch server locations at the moment.

• Los Angeles
• Chicago
• Columbus
• Washington DC
• Frankfurt
• Amsterdam
• London
• Paris
• Rome
• Bahrain
• Tokyo
• Seoul
• Taipei
• Sydney

Those are all of the dedicated locations at the moment. It’s unfortunate for those living in a few regions. How much does the Overwatch servers location distance to you actually matter though?

Why Does Server Location Matter?

The location of servers in an online game matters for a few reasons, the biggest is your connection though. If you’re far away from the overwatch servers, it adds a delay in communicating with your game. This is what increases your ping. It doesn’t affect Overwatch server status but performance.

Ping is a measurement in the game which judges your communication with the game servers. With each input, your moves are being communicated to the game’s servers, which then communicate back everything else that is happening in game. Ping is how long this communication takes. Essentially, the OW servers are pinged by your device.

A longer time between communication will mean that your inputs are being translated over to the Overwatch 2 servers slowly. This means you might experience more lag, even with a stable internet connection. This will give you at a disadvantage compared to others who are closer to the server, even playing the picks from the top of the OW tier list.

It means a natural limit to how fast your connection to the game is. players might have a worse performance than others thanks to how far away they are. Of course, this isn’t be all and end all of ping, there are still ways you can mitigate problems with distance from the Overwatch servers.

Can You Work Around a High Ping in Overwatch?

If you’re far away from one of the Overwatch servers locations, there are things you can do. Essentially being further away means it’ll take longer for your device to communicate. There are things you can do to speed up that communication though. One of the best things to focus on is what you can change about your connection. Getting a faster and more stable connection can lead to faster communication. Even over longer distances.

Getting a better connection to the game’s server can be helped by your own connection. Using a wired connection can help a lot. As can generally cutting down on sources of interference for your connection. Having a higher ping can be a pain, but it’s not such a disadvantage that you can’t play around it. You can still win games and perform very strongly.

Overwatch isn’t a game where players are expected to have zero ping. As a more limited team-based game, the server connection is often more stable than bigger live service games too. Being a far distance from the Overwatch server locations can be a pain, but you can definitely work around it if you want to perform well anyway.