…is stupid. I understand the desire to guarantee profits. I grasp that people pay licensing fees in order to have exclusive rights within a territory. But there’s no “right to profit” anywhere that I’ve ever seen, and if we ever want to pay more than lip service to the concept of a global economy, we should pay attention to the world we’ve created that doesn’t have borders (beyond economic ones, a topic for a whole ‘nother rant).
At any rate, TERA just announced that they will not be IP blocking. Players can freely choose between North American and European servers. Bravo.
http://211.43.148.85/forums/showthread.php?t=9682
Money quote: In a time that players are becoming more connected around the world, we believe that IP blocking has no place in a world class Action MMO.
I can’t tell my favorite IP block story in a public forum, but every time I’ve heard this discussion come up it’s been in the context of “Preventing gold farmers from ruining the game.” (which actually means preventing gold farmers from costing the company a lot of money in Credit Card charge-backs.
I know of at least one company that IP blocked all of China for just that reason. The gold farmers were back in action in less than 24 hours. They bought proxies in Eastern Europe and routed though there.
Unfortunately the organizations in China do more than sell gold. A lot of MMO players are seeing their accounts hacked through a concerted effort to brute-force login and password combinations across all of the popular MMOs. Since many people use the same login and password on all of their game accounts (if not all of their online accounts in general), a success on one means a success on any. Accounts breached on one game are quickly checked against all games, the characters stripped of items and sold off as rapidly as possible.
The scope of these attacks are massive – coming from addresses spread across entire class B ranges (~65,000 addresses in scope) simultaneously. They’re also getting more clever. They hit account creation pages to ferret out used account names, and then, rather than trying the same account multiple times which usually trips off a lock-out, they use a massive network to try each account once, cycling through the accounts only after several hours of attempts. Chinese IP block owners are poorly documented and the responsible parties don’t respond to inquiries. The only remaining option is to block large swaths of Chinese IPs and the relays that then pop up and force them to work to identify new relays.
The regional blocking is different though – and probably comes down to tax and finance laws. For example, I believe that in the EU, the merchant is responsible for accurately identifying the country of residence of the consumer, collecting VAT and remitting it. And oh yes, according to the EU you’re required to do that even if you’re a mom-and-pop shop in Ohio, USA and have no presence in the EU and don’t even want customers from there. Of course, they don’t (and can’t) enforce it.. until you become a big enough company that you have some asset residing in the EU – at which point you can be audited and slapped with fines and back-taxes for money that you can’t entirely prove didn’t come from EU citizens putting in the wrong country on your online payment system to avoid VAT. Faced with this, the companies with the twitchy lawyers insist that VAT be charged for anyone with an origin IP identified as coming from the EU. The companies with twitchy lawyers but without a billing system that can handle the infinite maze of ever changing tax laws end up splitting their system into two – so the finance people can manually calculate VAT out of the EU system while not messing with the US system.
I miss the days when games had no regions, and everyone played on the same servers. It was more fun to be amongst and meet people from across the globe.
I miss ‘em too. Back in the old days when I played MetalKnights, my regiment included people who hailed from Sweden, Turkey and Japan – people who became long time friends over chat services like ICQ. It brought with it a feeling of being part of a global community that’s I’ve really missed in recent years.
Tax issues may lead one to segregate people by IPs, not necessarily to blocking them. Also, I’d rather be IP blocked than being forced to use a publisher.
For example, a few months ago I read that in the F2P DDO I could bring my account to Premium status by buying a box. Cool, I go to amazon.co.uk and order a copy. Lo and behold, “invalid serial” says the account page. WTF? I give up trying, and THREE months later their support deigns to answer: box bought in Europe = can only use the serial on Codemasters’ servers, which aren’t F2P.
Similar thing happened to me a few years ago with some expansion to DAoC. I have an imported US box and an account on the US servers. The expansion bought on Amazon UK would work only on the European GOA accounts. At least Amazon refunded my money in the end.
So I’d rather Turbine and Mythic actually DID some IP blocking
.
No one is going to touch latency/lag/etc? Or have I missed that debate already?
Glen: as long as servers are tagged with location, surely people can decide for themselves whether being on a non optimal server (latency-wise) is worth it? Don’t see it as much of an issue, but that may be because I live in NZ.
Indeed, but don’t forget that just because you are allowed to play doesn’t mean the experience will be the same as playing on the same region. Remember, your location and the servers location does matter on top of the other players you play with. Not only do you send information from your location to the server, but it also sends information from the server to the players you’re playing with at the same time. Any delays in that process means you not only impact your game play experience, but also the players you are beating monsters down with.
One of the good reasons for region locks is because it helps keep things controlled. The more players you have from all of the world connection to one server then the heavier the strain will be on the server(s). It not only impacts you but everyone else too. Therefore, when things start going south (lag and other assorted issues), then it can catch fire within the community.
Granted, it doesn’t mean the idea is not good. Opening the gates to allow all players all over the world to play together is a very good thing. But, unless you specifically design your tech around it, then you could see things like latency/lag/etc become a bigger problem that you simple wont be able to just take away.
All right, but don’t complain when your European server is a money-loser because all of the EU players are on the USA servers due to a cheaper sub/cash shop rate. Or worse, players start to migrate to the russian servers because they can buy cash shop goods for pennies on the dollar.
Also don’t complain when the global economy bites your MMO in the ass because its far cheaper to hire programmers and artists in hungary or korea, making a competitor that trounces your own MMO in the market.
That’s what Tera hopes to do, for one.