worldofwar.de: Is there a synchronized release of all localized versions possible? If not how long will the other languages be delayed?
Chris Sigaty: We will release the US and Korean versions together. The european version will follow around 2-4 month later.
Well that’s just great… Just give us the bloody english version! Bleh…
And even if you import the US copy, you can’t play on US servers unless you have a US billing address.
Oh US developers, why do you hate the Europe so?
There’s a lot of anger directed at blizzard over this right now (run into it on various boards). This, and the short term block on europeans playing on U.S. servers even after launch.
Of course, if they decided to delay the U.S. release while they localized, I think you’d see a bit more anger.
It probably makes sense to avoid a flood of high latency europeans on US servers to start with. I didn’t run into many players warping around or whatever in the stress test, so maybe WoW handles this well, but I doubt they handle it perfectly.
I did notice one maybe-not-so-trustworthy interview mentioned paypal as a planned way to pay for WoW. If so, that might be a way to cloak where you live.
I understand that localization takes time and I’m not saying that they should delay the launch for everybody because of it. I’m just saying that most of Europe could play just as well with the (US) english version (and maybe excluding Germany and France, most gamers will prefer an english version over a localized one), so I don’t see the point in delaying e.g. the UK release (especially since there will be a separate UK, German and French server anyway).
I guess the latency might be an issue, but at least DAoC worked fine when I played it on US servers and I’ve heard good things about latency in FFXI where everyone plays on Japanese servers.
I have to say I find this kind of logistical ineptitude annoying, and it deters me greatly from buying the game. I had this same problem with DAoC, and it was frustrating to read about people playing the game for months, and then boring of it, before I could even get to see it. At least with DAoC there they didn’t deliberately block Europeans from the US servers, so with a bit of effort you could play. I find that a lot of the fun I have with a new game, especially MMPORPGs, is discovering how they work, where things are and what things do. When the game has already been out in another country for several months, the whole game has been strip-mined, with every discovery discovered, and all that angle of the fun removed. I won’t buy a game at full price that has been out on the shelf somewhere for four months already, as part of the reason for me buying a game at a premium price is the enjoyment of playing the game when it is new.
What about us Asians that aren’t part of the Korean/Japanese peninsula/conglomerate/borg machine?
When do we get it?
I played Lineage 2 on the US server “Gustin” for a while. You would be surprised how many Germans and French are on that server. Still I agree, the general public prolly wants localised versions.
Guilds are affected by this too, because many guilds are trans-national. Right now WoW has guilds playing in the beta with people from all over. Our guild has at least one member in Guam and another in the UK, and they play with few problems if any. Some players have reported successful play sessions all the time with 800-1000ms pings. WoW is very good at handling latency, at least in beta.
A lot of this has a history though, going back to Diablo II and the “Korean Invasion,” apparently. And there are other historical antecedents, such as Veeshan on EQ and the Japanese-American guild wars…
I think most of these problems would be solved by separating the servers by language and not by geographical location.
I somehow think that part of the reason servers are restricted is because of the delay in European release. A LOT of impatient European players would crowd the US servers and by the time EU WoW is released, the EU servers might be left a bit under-populated.
I somehow think that part of the reason servers are restricted is because of the delay in European release. A LOT of impatient European players would crowd the US servers and by the time EU WoW is released, the EU servers might be left a bit under-populated.
Quite possibly. But Blizzard, based on the admittedly incomplete info we have, seems to be going about it somewhat oddly, in that the company seems to be ignoring the needs of trans-national guilds, of which there are many. To their credit, though, in the beta forums, they are noting that they are working on ways for guilds to stay together no matter what the localization steps are.
Wait… so as it currently stands the one person I play these games with reliably, who happens to be in the UK, is physically incapable of playing WoW with me because he obviously has a UK billing address and I have a US one? Or is he just physically incapable of doing so for the first 4-6 months? (Either way makes me not want to bother with the game, since the primary reason I’d pick it up is to play something that a large proportion of my friends would be interested in and congregate in again. However, since a decent number of them are from overseas, if Blizzard actually goes through with this idiotic plan…)
I have never been in a MMORPG guild that didn’t have at least a few non-Americans in it. One of the coolest things about these games is the way they can bring together different people from all around the world in order to pursue a common goal. This is clearly a rookie mistake from Blizzard. They should have paid attention to the huge flap caused when AC2 made a similar policy. Not that there is any chance of WoW flopping as badly as AC2 did, but they sure are pissing away alot of goodwill earned from the stress test.
Ubisoft/Wolfpack did the same thing with Shadowbane. I ended up buying about 10 copies for non-US guildmates and most of them were able to activate it with certain cards. Although I had to sponsor someone from Germany untill they got a cc that finally worked. Is the same company distributing the software in the US and Europe? If so I would think money is money. :P
Look, after reading “huk huk manner game” a billion times on battle.net, I’m all for English-only servers.
Wait… so as it currently stands the one person I play these games with reliably, who happens to be in the UK, is physically incapable of playing WoW with me because he obviously has a UK billing address and I have a US one? Or is he just physically incapable of doing so for the first 4-6 months? (Either way makes me not want to bother with the game, since the primary reason I’d pick it up is to play something that a large proportion of my friends would be interested in and congregate in again. However, since a decent number of them are from overseas, if Blizzard actually goes through with this idiotic plan…)
It’s hard to actually tell; there has been no official comment on the producer’s comments, or the interpretations thereof, other than to confirm indirectly that there will be different servers for each region and, again somewhat indirectly, that it won’t depend on your copy of the game but on your billing method/address. That, and the few comments from Blizzard on the beta forums seem to imply that they are still working of the final implementation.
People have already hatched schemes to make sure their European friends can play at launch, and after (from what I can tell, this is a case of no Euros on US servers, period, not a time-limted by launch date thing) by doing such things as buying two accounts here and collecting money from a European friend to defray the credit card costs each month, while the European player uses the account.
Blizzard makes great games, but I do think hubris is one of their flaws.
On one hand, the language barrier can really shred an MMORPG. On the other, it does seem like a pretty big logistical blunder to do this instead of just waiting for the localisations to be done for a simultaneous world release, because it’d only be a problem if non-English speaking people hopped on in droves and dug in roots with their chars before the European version hit.
Whats this whole global economy thing I keep hearing about? They waited for a month on warcraft 3 so they could have a worldwide release…
That’s strange. Not sure why they couldn’t do loc at the same time as the final stages of the project…
They may be handing off the localized translation, development, servers, and management to foreign entities. It’s not an uncommon thing to do in mmog-land. In fact the only unusual thing they did was taking on the korean development themselves.
I’m one of the most active on the beta forum. I won’t repeat everything here so I just comment a few details:
Guilds are affected by this too, because many guilds are trans-national.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. In USA the servers will be branded to be west or east coast. For the first time the guilds and the players are forced to choose the server on the location and not just by looking at a silly name. This has already the potential to shatter the community and the major guilds.
The other aspect of the problem is purely about design.
Including different timezones (between the two coasts) allow the game to have a smooth population level and a longer “life cycle” for each day. By branding the servers after a location you strongly reduce the time span and the population will jump roughly up and down.
For everyone this choice will make the game less playable. A moment the server will be flooded and a moment later it will be deserted.
And since the game IS a steeply treadmill, yes, it’s a BIG problem having to start a few months later.
Taking this a step further,
WoW’s population peaks and valleys will be worse than most other MMO’s out there.
Having a worldwide server - like EQ - means that population lows in Europe, East Coast, West Coast and Asia don’t coincide - the servers remain relatively populated as players log in and log off throughout their peak playing hours.
WoW won’t have that - when they are at off-peak, they will really be off peak, and their server populations will be very low.
Not predicting this as a bad thing or good thing - just noting it.
-Walt