Server Centralization Suggestion

@boredom, the EU servers are hosted in France and the US ones in Canada actually, at the same reliable hosting company. The fact you're from US West is indeed troublesome but not much you can do especially when you call a ~250 ping unplayable so I will assume you are a pvp player and most avid pvpers are really picky when it comes to that, expecting somewhere below <50ms which means the server should be close to you otherwise it's no good. Your ping from California should be anywhere between 100-250 depending on your provider routing connection and for Diablo2 this is considered a fine ping, especially if playing PVM which vast majority of players are doing in this game, anything more than that means something is not fine and please by all means ignore the fps in-game command that displays the ping value - never rely on that considering it never was and never will be accurate, tools like winmtr should be used instead. Now, no matter how you take it, this game is old and the platform architecture is old too. There are people all over the world playing here, most are having a good and stable connecting while some may not or they expect too much from the game itself or the geolocation. There is a reason why blizzard split this game into multiple gateways US West, US East, Europe, Asia, etc and this is because there is no way to bring everyone together and keep them all happy, that and of course they are the original creators and host hundreds of servers accross the globe. Here on our realm, you get assigned to the emptiest server close to you, however when you join a new game or someone's game then chances are that the server assigned to him is the european one therefore you can't possibly communicate with him in-game while he's on the eu server and you're on the us one so you get assiged to the server he's playing on and viceversa. To be honest we've came accross quite a few californians around and maybe only a few had high latency values although as I already said some people could consider 100ms high and that's really not the case for Diablo2 especially if they have a stable connection which would make quite a difference.

East Coast isn't the midway as you would think so. Countries like France, Germany, Netherlands have always been considered as midway geolocation positioned for gameservers and other type of servers in general. Keep in mind there are players all over the world playing here and we mean it, we even have players from Madagascar, Alaska or Gabon. There are many other things to take into consideration such as how reliable is the hosting company and their servers in a different country, ddos protection which is very important considering nowdays attacks, price of course and so much more which only a few countries can offer. At the moment, there isn't really a better solution than the one we use so we will stick to this one, you may try debugging why your latency is higher than it should be or give a try to wtfast alike softwares as some people have succeeded improving the connection with that. What makes us great, together with the huge amount of players online as you said is that everyone is able to play together and more important is that our community is educated differently and unlike a regular ladder start hype which last only 1-2 months and then the realm becomes a ghost town, in this particular realm (and only here!) the players activity is sky high even after more than 1,5 years into the ladder which is simply awesome and the fact that we have no bots whatsoever in here makes it even better.