Great article - finally something here in mmorpg.com that's original.

I'm also one of the foreigners - from Brazil. I bought the "Brazilian" version of City of Heroes - but played in the American servers; until today, I cannot buy the extra power packs, because of my "version". It's always like that - if you don't play the American version of a mmog (not a problem with that), you're bound to be screwed, sooner or later. Imagine what the Chinese players are going through now, afraid they've lost their chars forever? Or the Europeans, who always have to wait for their version/release.

Time zone differences are already a problem - I'm living in Germany now, and besides that difference, we also have daylight savings time. So a 3 hours difference become 5 hours for about half a year - I can only meet my friends on the weekends, and only if we're all free.

In the end, I tend to favor SOE games - you buy them wherever you are and you play in servers that welcome the whole world. You make friends, learn about other cultures first hand and practice your English (my case).

One thing that surely is bad is when the "guettos" form - people who don't speak the game's main language - you're there trying to communicate with a fellow player and all he/she can say is "sry dont speak engrish" (I've received these exact words a lot of times over the years).

The interesting thing I'm seeing with all the examples being given is that those with global servers tend to run their own servers. That costs money, and money is often tight for smaller developers. Smaller companies have to rely on 3rd party publishers often just to reduce costs; the side effect of this is that most publishers tend to be regional and trying to get mulitple publishers to work together is very near impossible. However, in many cases, this regionalization is the only way a game gets out there for the public to play at all, so while i prefer single shard worlds like EVE, I also understand not every game developer has the budget for the servers needed to pull that off.

This is a great article, and the comments are fascinating. 

Several people have mentioned the perception that latency favors players in certain geographical regions. For example, one person suggested that lower latency rates in FFXI made it possible for Japanese players to attack mob bosses faster. 

Is this just a myth? Is it true that latency rates would make it easier for some players to pull mobs? If so, is it theoretically possible to modify the game's code in a way that would bypass geographical favoritism? (For example, the system would poll the area for other player characters capable of pulling the mob and would pause for one second to allow geographically distant characters the chance to initiate a pull sequence. Once a pull sequence was initiated by more than one group, the system would randomly decide who successfully pulled the mob.) 

My questions are: (1) is latency-based geographical favoritism just a myth and (2) would it be difficult to code around such favoritism? 

Aaron

Of course one of the unfortunate realities why ALL online services (not just MMO developers) are looking more and more to either have local partners responsible for running their services in a nation/region or having some logical segregation of services is the increase in attempts of government regulation of online goods/services.

More and more governments are trying to impose local laws on businesses that offer online services to consumers in thier countries. Was less so years ago....as the internet tended to slip under the radar of government bearucrats.... unfortunately that's less and less true these days.....and doing business across national boundries is becoming more of a minefield for companies trying not to run afoul of local laws.

It totaly sucks, but I honestly don't blame many companies for trying  to license thier products to local distributers/publishers who are familar with local laws and regulations  and let them deal with the hassle and risk  involved .

Originally posted by Domenicus 

 

Maybe they came out of the closet too largelly with the RP article, and now they are doing some kind of cosmetic support to customers after that... What I do know that it is an incridible coincidence that we are now talking about how important is to you to play with your foreign friends, not only with your country-player-base just after Blizzard having problems with their chinese servers and lost 6M players...

Of course this site support only the big guns and treat the players are cattle, after all its a free forum paid by the big guns... What have made me surprised was the RP article, because its was so naive to think that we could not see which side they were playing for, so clearly... And what is so idiotic is the same thing that happened with the financial crisis... Inconditional support to the stablishment and not know that what makes the wheel to roll are the people, above all of that... WE subscribers are the base of every game, starting to treat us as the most important thing in the process is a good business direction... Remember NGE, Aoc, etc... And, yes, if you try to save something and NOT make a RP server, for exemple, you will win now and lose later... No matter how much the stablishment thinks otherwise and asks you to support it....

You know if you replace big guns with fat cats this sounds a little bit like communist propaganda from the cold war era ;)

Now seriously, the "business arguments" can't be disregarded by developers because after all is said and done they are still running a business. That means they want to make money. And although a non-profit-MMO undoubtedly would be an interesting concept I am not aware of any successful application. So why should someone writing an article disregard these arguments when in reality they are going to affect the decisions about certain features in MMOs immensely. If you disregard financial viability you suddenly get into a realm where any ludicrous demand is acceptable. I have found that the last few articles on this site were quite interesting because they didn't exactly mirror back what we as players want to hear. Maybe it's a shocking concept for some here but the quality of an article shouldn't be measured in how closely it reflects your own opinion.

I like this article but I don't agree with the conclusion. I think that from a company perspective the number of people for whom the segregation is a game breaker is probably so small that it doesn't outweigh the benefits of having it. Of course as a player I am not a huge fan of it for the many reasons stated in the article but it's not very high on my priority list and wouldn't affect my buying decision too much. Why should the developer care when it makes them more money this way? If enough people care enough to not buy games that segregate players you wont see it anymore.

And nobody is asking anyone to support anything. They might try to convince you that you would like their game but I have yet to see a developer that asks you to buy their game out of pity.

I hate regional servers. In games like EVE or AO theres very few servers that are host to a global community. What does this mean to me? Say I got a day off from work, I'm still most likely getting up at 530am. If I jump onto AO at 7am est theres a good chance that our european friends have something already rolling when I log on. So no matter when I log on theres a good chance something is going on and I can be entertained whether its 8pm, 3am, 7am, 1pm or any other time.

Now log onto a not so popular server on WOW and unless its primetime theres practically nothing going on. Even the most popular servers have large periods of dead time unless theres the rare community from say Kuwait that lives on the server.

If your going to force me to play on regional servers, I would prefer more specific choices. If I have to be on a purely US server, why cant I choose the Florida server? I know some games couldnt support servers for every state, but some can and should. One of the worst things about WOW, every local I met that played WOW all come from different servers no one else has every heard of, thats just stupid.

 I can only hope that while companies making money will always be their #1 objective (And rightly so) they will have room in their "hearts" for global releases and global communities.

But I suppose it comes down to the size of the publisher in question. Sony Online Entertainment is by many considered the bane of the good MMOG's, but atleast they are large enough to ensure that the player gets the choice of where to play rather than force them into a cage based on where they live.

The only thing runescape is good for these days... cross server characters.

Originally posted by LynxJSA

Originally posted by aaradun

Yes, having world server and so on is nice and all, but really other then for a very small minority this is not ideal.

EVE using one world server and their playerbase is about the size of WAR's, AOC's or LOTRO's. What is a 'very small minority' to you?

1) if your not in the timezone that is prelevant on the server then odds are your going to end being bored and quitting 

It is currently 6:50 AM EST (shortly after maintenance) and there are over 17k people ingame in EVE Online. Source: http://www.eveonline.com/serverstatusgraph.ashx?gid=1 A single shard universe increases the odds that people will be around when you log in as they are not spread across multiple servers.

(Take EVE North American playerbase as an example. It makes up what 4% of the userbase)

See, now you're not even trying to sound believable anymore. *waggles finger* :) 

 

 

I've pllayed EVE and i'm NA and main reason i stopped playing was becaue our PRIMETIME is dead time in EVE. most space other then JITA, core lvl 4 mission hubs is empty. Most of everything is empty for a fact. And  after DT is not rekevant really beceause it's middle of day for most of Europe (which is the core playerbase of this game). And 17k at noon is reallly a bad indication, it's like 300-500 people onine on a WoW server (IE:: dead) . It's not a whole lot. out of these 17k, 1-2k are AFK macro farmer, there's 3-4k of them in Jita area, another another good chunk is AFK in base somewhere waiting for a skill to finish, or AFK freighter pilots.

Most of 0.0 is empty, and your lucky if you find more then one or two people in non mission area or market area (Jita for example).

Finally, the 4% was a number i saw somewhere. It probably too low but North American does indeed make a very small number of EVE playerbase (i'd be suprised if it's more then 10%). In fact it's probaby more popular in NA if it did have iNA servers (but then again the game gets boring fast so who knows)

Craig Morrison (Silirrion), Game Director for Age of Conan, on Global servers (on his Twitter blog today):

( http://twitter.com/Silirrion )

"Personally I like the concept of global servers, but it's not something feasible to change at this juncture for AoC."

He was previously GD for Anarchy Online, whose servers are global.

I  used to play with a international guild in World of Warcraft, well it was mainly UK based with members who were from the UK/Scotland/Ireland/North America before Blizzard broke up the guild and force seperate servers on us based on region. 

Reason they gave was that the EU put out a VAT internet Access Fee that every member of the of the EU had to pay to access the internet including playing any online games. 

They also claimed that if they allowed North American players to play on the EU servers we would have to pay more then $25 a month just to cover the VAT access fees that blizzard would have to pay for every north american player to play there. 

I think this is bullshit, Blizzard really drop the ball on this.  They became fearful of the VAT and the costs of doing business. 

Regional servers hurt in the long run. We in North America were not allowed to buy access to the EU/UK servers and EU/UK could not buy access to the North America Servers. 

I  missed my friends from the UK, we had good times. I still have access to my UK guild forums, they complain that the server they play on is low population and nearly dead.  Blizzard Europe has servers setup for different countries in the EU  and sometimes based on languages. 

Originally posted by Thalarius

I  used to play with a international guild in World of Warcraft, well it was mainly UK based with members who were from the UK/Scotland/Ireland/North America before Blizzard broke up the guild and force seperate servers on us based on region. 

Reason they gave was that the EU put out a VAT internet Access Fee that every member of the of the EU had to pay to access the internet including playing any online games. 

They also claimed that if they allowed North American players to play on the EU servers we would have to pay more then $25 a month just to cover the VAT access fees that blizzard would have to pay for every north american player to play there. 

I think this is bullshit, Blizzard really drop the ball on this.  They became fearful of the VAT and the costs of doing business. 

Regional servers hurt in the long run. We in North America were not allowed to buy access to the EU/UK servers and EU/UK could not buy access to the North America Servers. 

I  missed my friends from the UK, we had good times. I still have access to my UK guild forums, they complain that the server they play on is low population and nearly dead.  Blizzard Europe has servers setup for different countries in the EU  and sometimes based on languages. 

 

I know how that is. I've lost some good friends that way. I still hear from some, from time to time, but its not the same as playing with them on a daily basis. I can't really blame Blizzard though. Its the damn politicians and their eternal regulation, taxation and other such nonsense.  Look at WoW China for an example of how bad it gets. Millions of people lost their game, because some members of some Chinese ministry didn't get their pay off.  How that will turn out, who knows? Its all about power in the final analysis. Its too bad that business can not be conducted without having to deal with such corruption.

Original Post :

The beauty of the Internet is that it is - to invoke the cliché - a global village. MMOs need to be mindful of this. They're about social bonds and the formation of communities. The more they limit it, the more fractured their player base becomes, the harder it will be to keep people online.

This is probably the best summary about how MMO connects communities.

This is the same thing I talk in the post of MMO evolution last week or so.

Major title MMO these days still don't realize how important it is for online communities to be connected , and it is very frustrating.

As for regional MMO seperation, I believe there are still technical and poticial issues, and it is sad that game companies do not invest on how to improve and resolve these issues.

Major companies these days are still looking for ways to earn money rather than continously improving game genre, and it is a very sad thing.

BTW, this is an excellent acticle, excellent.

Perhaps Domenicus did over egg the social justice angle, but I agree broadly with what he says. What I was getting at Horusgirl, is not that the business argument has no relevance. Rather it seemed obvious that when looking at a range of issues over the last few months the staff and guest writers have always agreed with the business argument. Every article was about saving MMO companies money, and increasing their customer base. This one was not, which I thought was odd, considering the extremely company before player view being perpetuated here.

I do not believe this is because the staff have too much concern for where their advertising comes from, I do believe that they may well be spending too much time with company executives. While it is great for the site that we have staff getting the inside low down on what MMO companies think, I think they need to step back and not take everything that comes from MMO company staffers and pundits as gospel.
 

Oh and yes, I think this article is a fair summery of the pros and cons of a difficult issue for both MMO's and players.

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There ARE reasons why games can't do multiple languages/regions simultaneously. It's called money. You know, the one thing you always run out of as a small developer (or even big developers).

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Still not a good enough reason to block people from playing in other regions, if they pay for it. It is actually arrogant to assume that people should be playing with their own language servers.

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Plus, restricting by region can be due to publishing rights, etc. Or is the game developer supposed to be all powerful and say to all of its various publishers, you will allow anyone on your servers regardless of whether they paid you to play there! Um, no.

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Yes, but that was not Dana's core argument. I doubt you even read the article because he discussed this on the second paragraph.

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Then, of course, there's the "if you allow someone who wants to play on an Oceanic server to be with friends" play that way, they must deal with the lag of that connection, and all the problems that arise from it. Sure, most people have a basic idea of geography, but most certainly don't have a clue about how the internet works. So when they lag, they get upset, and tend to bad mouth the game as laggy, and eventually quit.

---

Non sequitur.
 

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Besides that, people tend to play close to home because of the language barriers, culture, etc. So while having a choice is nice, does it make financial sense to try to open up a community which prefers to remain closed? Take EQ1 for example: The Nameless server was the server of choice for people from Taiwan, and various other servers were for the french, spanish, german, etc.

 

Sure, I met people from all parts of the world on my server, but most of them remained clumped up with people from their own areas. So the benefit to EQ1 for having one "world" collection of servers? Very small if any.

---

 
Personal preferences. I could easily turn that argument other way around, but it would just be waste of time. Let's just say that WoW, for example, destroyed many global guilds.

While I understand the economics behind regionalisation of game, I find the enforced regionalisation of games counter productive.

I can only speak from my personal experience.  I am an Aussie living in Korea.  I teach EFL, it's my job.  I usually play  F2P games for personal reasons and I find regionalisation reduces the number of games I can play.

I find for many NA versions of these games I am blocked from playing, some even block me from viewing the website, so I cannot continue to join in the forums for these games.  I then try to legally join the Korean version of the game.  I have a Korean (foreigner) social security number that should (technically) allow me to play the game.  Unfortunately, most companies decline to use the database that will allow foriegner KSSN's to be read and alternative methods require jumping through hoops that would surprise you. 

It's not that I refuse to play the Korean language versions, I'm sure I would quite enjoy it if I could.  I can read Korean well enough that I can follow what is happening or at least do research in English. Its just that many Korean versions of games seem to actively hinder non-Koreans from playing the game even though they are resident in Korea

As a new media scholar who studies transnational play in virtual worlds, I was thrilled to read this article. Dana does an excellent job of acknowledging multiple sides of the issue. 

Some of you might have noticed postings from me in various MMORPG forums related to cross-cultural play. If anyone reading this thread is willing to chat about their experiences with international guilds, non-region-locked servers, and cross-cultural encounters in the gameworld, please feel free to contact me at transnationalgaming@gmail.com.

Thanks! 

Aaron Delwiche

Associate Professor 

Department of Communication

Trinity University

Originally posted by aaradun

Originally posted by LynxJSA

Originally posted by aaradun

Yes, having world server and so on is nice and all, but really other then for a very small minority this is not ideal.

EVE using one world server and their playerbase is about the size of WAR's, AOC's or LOTRO's. What is a 'very small minority' to you?

1) if your not in the timezone that is prelevant on the server then odds are your going to end being bored and quitting 

It is currently 6:50 AM EST (shortly after maintenance) and there are over 17k people ingame in EVE Online. Source: http://www.eveonline.com/serverstatusgraph.ashx?gid=1 A single shard universe increases the odds that people will be around when you log in as they are not spread across multiple servers.

(Take EVE North American playerbase as an example. It makes up what 4% of the userbase)

See, now you're not even trying to sound believable anymore. *waggles finger* :) 

 

 

 

I've pllayed EVE and i'm NA and main reason i stopped playing was becaue our PRIMETIME is dead time in EVE. most space other then JITA, core lvl 4 mission hubs is empty. Most of everything is empty for a fact. And  after DT is not rekevant really beceause it's middle of day for most of Europe (which is the core playerbase of this game). And 17k at noon is reallly a bad indication, it's like 300-500 people onine on a WoW server (IE:: dead) . It's not a whole lot. out of these 17k, 1-2k are AFK macro farmer, there's 3-4k of them in Jita area, another another good chunk is AFK in base somewhere waiting for a skill to finish, or AFK freighter pilots.

Most of 0.0 is empty, and your lucky if you find more then one or two people in non mission area or market area (Jita for example).

Finally, the 4% was a number i saw somewhere. It probably too low but North American does indeed make a very small number of EVE playerbase (i'd be suprised if it's more then 10%). In fact it's probaby more popular in NA if it did have iNA servers (but then again the game gets boring fast so who knows)

I've played EVE in NA, US East coast and I have to say, what part are you from because what you state is totally untrue.

Its busy as heck when I play, I've been in massive (400 vs 400) fleet battles in "empty" 0.0  (and ganked there several times while I'm ratting as well)

I've fought large empire wars against Merc Corps (with up to 75 people in my corp flying with me) at around 10 or 11 pm in the evening, so again I ask, what game where you playing?

I've played EVE right after downtime, as its a great time to run past gate camps btwn low sec and 0.0 and if you aren't quick enough or lucky, you still get tagged by a rapidly reforming camp.

I can't attest to actual numbers of NA players, but I actually know 5 here in my hometown, which is pretty amazing when you think of how small and distributed the player base is.

No, we have no issues with the number of players in EVE no matter what time of day, and if you check your star map you'll easily find systems at any time of day with a large number of pod kills within the last hour.

Which is why EVE is so great, you can always find a good corp to join that fits your prime play times and experience everything the game has to offer.

An EU/North America regional server/publisher split is one of my major dislikes and top marks to CCP for showing up other companies for being full of crap on this issue.

Originally posted by Renko

An EU/North America regional server/publisher split is one of my major dislikes and top marks to CCP for showing up other companies for being full of crap on this issue.

Exactly. But did you notice that even Eve has to have a server cluster in China?  Thats not due to technical issues. Its because the Chinese government demanded it.  Their attitude(like most governments) is we must control ALL, or we control nothing. In all too many cases one finds that its governments, rather than the companies involved that are interfering.

ping .. do i need to say more , how can there be such posts  on site like this..

i dont rly care if its going to be wow way , eu/america/asia , or vanguard/soe way,  all in one.. but servers located in those locations.. eu/usa etc

i rly dont care how perfect server you gona.. playing from eu in usa, probably gove give you atleast 50 ms.. bonus... not the bonus you would like..

second timezones.. wow. imagine global server.. i pick  server which is made of mostly lets say  everyone but european .. then lets say i play for week or two.. before i even notice.. cuz its lvling, game start blabla, you wont go grouping 24/7

in the end you either end up rerolling, browsing forums for unofficial european server.. so you can actually have more than 50 ppl online at a time.. cuz its middle of the night.. when its daytime for you ..

what kind of games you play.. to even ask such question.. you even mentioned your father.. chess isnt mmo.. chess is slow game.. without any concern about delay.. and no i do not wish to get up 6 am, before work.. so i can run instance..

Very great article. Unfortunately I believe this is soon to be a moot point as more and more gamers would rather just solo online multiplayer games, and the developers are heavily catering to them.

first  .. have mercy  ..... i just hada can of self made beer  at a little party  :)

second ....

realy strange about the first repley ....

shadowbane

i started playing in asian beta  and found  lot of nice people  to play  together and agaimst

in retail i was member of turkish  english and and some other  language dominated  groups .. i am german

i  was member of a guild lead bya chines guy i meet ... while we were in a german guild ... and joind a french aliance  ....  hahah .. it was way b4  the cn polarisatinon happened

was a lot of fun and realy good feeling to play and with all  those different kind of people ad cultures

 .. gbtw i was a guild leader of an english dominated guild for a while too  .....  

as a sidenote to devs and developers

DO NOT SEPERATE US  with those silly dedicted server  !!!!!

do not make it difficult  for us to play with people we like to play with

we players are able to  socialise with players  we like to  play with or against  if we like to

no matter which laguage or cultural background ... we can find each other  ...  if you give us the option in your design 

AND THATS ONE THING THAT MAKES MMORPG  A GREAT  WAY TO WASTE TIME

   hahaha

thanks for the oportunities  and damn youi if you prohibit them .......

Originally posted by Smikis

ping .. do i need to say more , how can there be such posts  on site like this..

i dont rly care if its going to be wow way , eu/america/asia , or vanguard/soe way,  all in one.. but servers located in those locations.. eu/usa etc

 

i rly dont care how perfect server you gona.. playing from eu in usa, probably gove give you atleast 50 ms.. bonus... not the bonus you would like..

 

second timezones.. wow. imagine global server.. i pick  server which is made of mostly lets say  everyone but european .. then lets say i play for week or two.. before i even notice.. cuz its lvling, game start blabla, you wont go grouping 24/7

in the end you either end up rerolling, browsing forums for unofficial european server.. so you can actually have more than 50 ppl online at a time.. cuz its middle of the night.. when its daytime for you ..

 

what kind of games you play.. to even ask such question.. you even mentioned your father.. chess isnt mmo.. chess is slow game.. without any concern about delay.. and no i do not wish to get up 6 am, before work.. so i can run instance..

 

 

The article was about giving players the freedom to choose. I firmly believe that servers should also list where they physically are, so that players can make an educated choice (especially when it comes to ping). FPS games do this very well, usually.

You're focusing on a detail that is irrelevent to the larger debate. The entire premise is about choice, not about forcing you to do anything. If to you ping is the single most important thing, then clearly you'll pick the connection server. If you play during "regular" hours, you'll pick a server that fits that style.

As this thread shows, lots of North Americans play at "European" times and so on. To them, another server might be more attractive. As it stands now, too many games make that choice for their players.

(and even EVE has a Chinese world)

is pretty clear that Dana have no idea about the Chinese law, in order to sell a MMO in China u must have the server in china (and even EVE has a Chinese world) so this line sound pretty stupid to me

edit: for that reason i hope the eve chinese server will die soon(TM)