Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

TIL that Overwatch Servers are named by Airports in their regions.

In one picture: https://imgur.com/a/RJhdR

I have long noticed the fact that Overwatch servers in different regions/locations have their own unique codename. You can check the IP and codename of the current server in-game by pressing Ctrl+Shift+N to activate Network Overlay.

However yesterday I discovered that those "codenames" are actually ~~IANA~~ IATA codes of the airports in the servers' region. For example, in the picture above, I connected to "ord1" while "ord" represents Chicago O'Hare Airport. Sometime I also noticed my client connecting to "lax1" (Los Angeles International Airport).

I'm just wanting to share this small discovery, I didn't confirm this for all the "server codenames" in Overwatch. Anyway, it may be useful for those who want to discover whether they are connecting to the best available server or not. Thanks!

edit: ~~IANA~~ IATA. Thanks /u/henrebotha another edit: /u/BillWarnecke has confirmed this!

Bill Warnecke

Posted 8 years, 7 months ago (Source)

Also, Asia:
tpe1 - Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport - Taiwan, China
hgh1 - Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport - China

Recently players in China reported that a new server named CNN, which is believed to be located in Beijing, China, was put online. However this code doesn't correspond to any airports in China. (Not hosted by Amazon?)

CNN1 is cn-north-1 AWS region in Beijing.
Bill Warnecke

Posted 8 years, 7 months ago (Source)

Yep this is correct! For servers hosted with AWS EC2 we use a slightly shortened version of their region identifier.

Bluetracker

TIL that Overwatch Servers are named by Airports in their regions.

Tweet