The Valve representative Milton just announced the launch of the first Middle-Eastern datacenter located in Dubai. The Middle-Eastern servers will become accessible in about two weeks, allowing the Middle-Eastern players to play DotA2 with acceptable latency.
The arrival of Middle-Eastern servers was known and expected since late 2013, and the statements from Valve employees set the launch of the new servers somewhere in February/March 2014. However, the residents of the areas that will benefit from the existence of such servers will probably have to wait until late April.
Earlier today, Milton - a Valve developer and representative stated the following in the DotA2 Dev forums :
The Dubai datacenter is finally online. Some of the links took a lot longer to get provisioned by our providers than expected. We will be turning on the region in a couple of weeks. But be warned that connectivity isn't going to be ideal initially. We are still waiting on other providers to come online to provide better local connectivity and connectivity to India. If you want to start testing things out, please send me tracert's to dxb.valve.net.
The Dubai servers will help Middle-Eastern players play the game with a proper latency. So far, they were facing several connectivity issues, since their location forced them to select between European and SEA servers, resulting in massive delays that affected their performance (and, in some way, the progress of the competitive Middle-Eastern scene). Let us hope that the new servers can finally allow the affected players to leave these troubled times behind, and enjoy DotA2 the same way as American and European players do.
Source : dev.dota2.com
