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Untitled Document
6th of October, Blizzard announced they would enforce a split localized server policy, which means you will need a local address and a local credit card, in order to play the game on your local server. Ultimately, this means European players in American guilds will have to play on European servers, and will not be allowed to continue playing with their guildmates; with their friends.
What Blizzard has done is no less than an outrage. A game that has all the potential in the world of becoming the best game ever seen, a game that over the last two years has built a great and solid community around it, is suddenly asked to split up. Essentially, Blizzard wishes, with a simple policy, to break communities, guilds and friendships. Europeans should play on their servers, Asians on theirs and Americans on theirs. If Blizzard had advised people to play on their local servers, sure, I could have lived with that. There are several reasons why they should make such a recommendation. Firstly, people on slow connections might experience lag when playing on a server overseas. Secondly, there are a small minority of European gamers who haven't completely mastered the English language. These are good reasons why Blizzard would advise people to play on their local servers. Heck, they might even be good reasons to hide non-local servers from the server-list and require you to use a special patch to open the rest. But these are NOT good reasons to use resources and valuable development time to build systems to block out non-local players.
The second reason, language difficulties, hardly applies. I myself am a Norwegian with Norwegian as my main language. My English is rather average compared to that of my fellow countrymen, yet I doubt you could have told from my article that English isn't my mother tongue. Blizzard must realize that the vast majority of European MMORPG gamers are fluent in English.
I won't begin to speculate why Blizzard has chosen to do this, as it would be just that, speculation. But I would have expected more from them, the company that's brought us so many legendary titles, that's never discriminated anyone based on nationality, but allowed everyone into all servers, regardless of geographical location.
From the moment World of Warcraft was announced two years ago, communites have been built and existing communities have decided to work together to create the most immersive play experience possible in the game. Yet this policy has the potential of crippling the many reasons to play the game. I think a user on the official beta forums summarized it nicely:
Dmitry: I am very sad about this. To Turaglun of Denmark, Sonic the Bard of France, Semien of the Czech Republic, to all of Vane (the best competition on E'Ci to my guild) from Japan. To the many Israeli's and Arabs I played with. To the Russians who asked whether my name (Dmitry) meant I was Russian too. To the hundreds of people I chatted with and played with in DAoC and EQ that were from other parts of the world;
I am really gonna miss you.
Its still possible to change this policy. It's still possible to re-unite people across the globe in their united love of World of Warcraft. Blizzard, please, for the sake of the game, for the sake of the community, let us play together.
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