Does the time zone of the server affect lag depending on location?

[Icecreamcake]

Sorry if the title was a title was a little confusing, but basically what I'm trying to ask is that say a server is PST timezone and I was playing from the East Coast, would I receive more lag (assuming same population and what not) from that server versus if I played on an EST time zone based server?

[jsz]

Yes.

/ten

[Pann]

In a perfect world the further away you are from a server the longer it will take for information to travel between the server and you. However it is not as simple as saying a realm with a different time zone to yours will be more laggy as it may be located in the same time zone as you whereas one in the same time zone maybe on the other side of the country.

Here is a list of servers by location; http://www.wowpedia.org/US_realm_list_by_datacenter as you can see many realms run on a different time zone to their location.

[Rivin]

I live on the West Coast. When I first switched from an EST server to a PST server, my latency was higher on the PST server than on the EST server...because the PST server was physically located on the East Coast and the EST server was physically located on the West Coast. So yeah, there's no way to tell exactly where a server actually is just by its time zone. That link Pann gave is great for checking their locations.

[S Blieft]

I play on 2 servers. One is midwest time(cst) but east coast data center, the other a pst server with a west coast data center.
I definitely notice a difference between the two. The pst server gives me about 40 ms, the cst one pulls about 100ms.

The link provided above is awesome to find a server that is close to you, it's how I chose the pst server.
wow.realmpop.com <--This is a great link to find populations of servers in case you're thinking of switching.

[Icecreamcake]

You guys are awesome! Thanks!