A ban wave has been initiated in World of Warcraft to close accounts for trading real-world cash for dungeon / raid clears as well as a series of bans for account sharing "in order to gain a competitive advantage during raid progression". Both are considered violations of the Terms of Use. There is no mention of the length of the bans.
Over on the EU WoW forums, devs have come in to address player concerns that the community is an "afterthought" and that most developer interaction takes place on the US forums. According to a post by the EU Community Manager "Aerythlea", WoW devs believe that communication has improved overall but that the time difference between Blizzard's California offices and the EU base in France causes some of the issue. Players, however, are not widely accepting that explanation and cite the need to merge forums to ensure the timely dissemination of information without any group feeling excluded.
There is also a 9 hour time difference between France (where the EU Community team is based) and California (where the developers are based). When we are in the office, the majority of the staff across the ocean are asleep or going to sleep. This means we don't have immediate access to get answers or information, so we send any requests or relevant details via email. More often than not, the feedback being raised by the EU player-base isn't that dissimilar to what is being raised by the NA player-base, so such matters become topics of discussion during office hours in California, this is often why information comes out during that time rather than during EU hours.
One player summed up the general consensus of many in the EU community by saying:
Taking into account the time differences and how large the EU team is considered to the NA forums, wouldn't it be better to have the two merged? If both teams are not working on similar clocks so there is some form of crossover for threads to be responded to, changes to be clarified and so on, that once again leaves the EU forums in the dark. Why would it take nine hours for someone who has the duty to post information on the forums to simply switch EU/NA and post it there too. It seems like there are a myriad of walls simply because the devs can't be bothered to remove the foundation that existed ten years ago, even if they have the better tools.
The issue of communication came about in response to a recent roleplaying server event that was hampered by "sharding", or the technology that "separates players in high-traffic areas into separate 'shards' of a particular zone". The RP event took place in a shared location but players could not always see one another or would fade in and out of a location due to sharding. Since the event, however, Blizzard has disabled shared realms in certain locations on RP servers. While the original post by the RP community happened on the US forum, as well as the subsequent dev answer, the response was not posted to EU forums for quite some time after.
You can read more at each of the links above.
