Motivations behind region restrictions in games

by Mr Daax , aka: SSG Daax, Tuesday, March 26, 2013, 11:56 (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.

I have no idea if this is at all possible, but I wonder if Bungie figured out a way for players to communicate without actually voice-chatting with one another. Of course, if you were in a party with your friends, you could be chatting with them. But when you have some random encounter with another player(s) in the game, maybe you can just choose to follow them around, or have a list of conversation options to choose from to convey to the other player what you are doing (kind of like conversation choices in Mass Effect.) The reason I think of this is that "In Search of the Heart of Bungie" interview by Polygon a couple months ago had this quote

"We were going to make this online universe where people are going to be able to sit on their couch and play games with people from the other side of the world...It was going to be this great communal experience. Everybody was going to realize that we were all just one shared humanity, and look, there's gonna be an outbreak of world peace. What it actually turned into was a bunch of frat boys teabagging one another and calling each other names. So I think we can do a lot better."

I'm still thinking about those last few lines. In a multiplayer game, how do you avoid the douchebaggery if there isn't some sort of fundamental difference between your game and every other multiplayer game out there? Perhaps change the way the players communicate with one another? Rather than having voice chatting between players, players can only communicate within the context of the game and its story. You have options of what to say to another player, eg, "I'm doing X mission," or, "I'm just shooting up some of the local fauna today," or, "Would you care to join me, fellow Guardian, on my journey to save the solar system?" And since these are pre-programmed conversation options, language barriers wouldn't be an issue. The game already has the French version of that conversation option you chose, and it displays that to the French guy you just came across in the game. This communication restriction feels a lot like limiting player choice, in which case I think there would be an personal option to allow other players to chat with you.

These are just some thoughts that I have on this, albeit not very thought out. What do you guys think?