Motivations behind region restrictions in games

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Tuesday, March 26, 2013, 08:08 (4269 days ago) @ kapowaz

Region-specific locks exist in MMOs for a few non-trivial reasons. First of all there is the language barrier: most MMOs involve a lot of communication, and if you can't communicate then it's going to affect the experience. Then there's timezones: if a game places particular importance on collaboration, then it's no good if your community aren't online simultaneously. This is — curiously enough — why World of Warcraft players in South Africa use the EU realms. Then there's latency. A US-based player could, if they so desired, get hold of an EU copy of World of Warcraft and play on the EU realms, but the experience would suck: latency would be so high that it'd affect the gameplay.

Those aren't good reasons to region lock. The proper thing to do is what Blizzard USED to do, and that's let you connect to whatever region you want. So you'd be presented with a list of realms, US East, US West, Europe, Asia, etc and the default would be the one closest to you. You'd get the best experience by choosing the default, but you could always override that and go where you wanted as long as you were willing to tackle the issues you mention.