Darth Hater

Don't get me wrong. If you want to play this game at all anytime this year or in the near future, I fully encourage you to do exactly what you have done.

All I'm saying is that citing customer service as the reason they didn't warn or prepare these locked regions before pre order started that they may have to wait for an undetermined amount of time before they are able to play the game is weak.

The way they have set it up, it could be months before the game is made available locally in the excluded regions. Doesn't anyone else feel that good customer service should have warned people about this before pre orders started?

This is what I really got out of what they said. You can buy our game now and pay the shipping costs yourself and you MIGHT be able to play our game if you are in an unsupported region at launch, but we aren't going to ship the game to your region retailers because we don't want to pay the shipping costs to make the game available in your country, but if you want to pay for the shipping, that's fine with us. Customer service is paramount to us having a successful launch.

Didnt say we could, either, while throwing open the doors to everyone else.
Didn't say anything but "not being ip blocked right now". That's most of the problem.
Misinformation? poppycock. Blithering on about ratings boards and language localisations is misinformation. Your own interview sorts those out.

Edit: just noticed your amorphous comment below "Some countries have import laws where all media must be available in the official language."

We know that publishers have a variety of problems when trying to launch a game overseas that range from regional politics, ratings boards, server infrastructure, localization, distribution, and more. Why did you choose not to launch in certain regions?

The answer is "none of the above." We didn't make that decision because of ratings board issues, localization or whatever else. What it ultimately comes down to is simple, but it is kind of a difficult concept to grasp: it is about quality of service.


Read your own interview. Stop spreading misinformation that you can't.
oops! copy paste fail!

Do these same import laws apply to digital distribution? And regardless, many of the countries in the 'red zone' these dont apply to, as they either dont have the laws or it is already in their local language (english).

Furthmore, these arent the reasons that certain countries are restricted, as the poster Bencor pointed out. You need to take ur own advice and stop the spreading of misinformation.

We also dont have 100% confirmation that there will be no IP restrictions on servers, just that SR thinks its probably going to be like that at the time being. We also have no idea if people from those countries will be able to purchase time to play the game after the free month. Additionally - while yes we can purchase the standard and CE editions, the DD is completely unavailable.

It's been confirmed by Allison on the devtracker. There are currently no plans to ip block any region for launch.

That's not going to satisfy everyone, but that's the state of it.

What? Compared to suggesting that the Australian Classification Board is responsible for our little troubles?

And for the other half of Europe, South America, Asia, rest of Oceana, Africa, etc?

So your interview has effectively and thoroughly debunked the idea that EA may not be releasing in Australia to avoid any chance (no matter how absurdly small) that Australia may not want to be released into. Our Government is a bunch of inconsistent reactionary morons, true, but even they don't ban star wars. Its cos we have this chip on our shoulder about being a backwater.

Their timing has dictated our beheading party. Telling us that we cant play after announcing preorders and a big sep beta is a cynical attempt to control the damage and to lose our story in the fluff. This has been planned for ages. Experience tells us that if we don't get our message out quickly and loudly (as we shan't, after all with the blase attitude from the US how much consumer power can we muster?), we may find ourselves in a world where we can be relegated to 6 months down the track every time. Like in the bad old days.

Edit. Just had a reread, and a contemplation of reasoning. Whats left if not a batty Australian classification system?
"The process of putting a boxed product in any territory is difficult" we want digital. or rather, would be satisfied with digital. our interwebz are not that awful.
"The process of deciding whether or not we want to put regional services into an area is also difficult." We have been playing on non oceanic servers for... well forever. The vast majority of my gaming is on non oceanic-servers. Are their pings really that bad? They may not need to ip block, as a 1500ms ping will drive the antipodean hordes from the shore.

I'm not talking about having it localised into different languages, just the simple ability to physically buy and play the game. Yes there are currently work-around methods to this to pre-order the CE and normal versions from places like Amazon (although the Digital Deluxe is essentially out of the question) and from what we've gathered in the past day or so is that there will be no IP restrictions, but it is still not 100% set in stone and anything could happen from now to launch.

The main problem, however, is that they announce the pre-orders, but do so with a condition - you have to live in one of the very small number of chosen countries, with no indication or explanation whatsoever of how, when, and if other countries would have it available at local retailers, whether or not they'd be able to get the bonuses from pre-order at a later date, whether they will even be able to play at "launch", whether they can play in the available servers at launch even if they're not from that country (except for a few responses on twitter indicating its likely, but not gauranteed) etc.

The fact that SR had to post "im not sure ill try find out" on twitter for several days speaks volumes about how poorly organised this is. If they were going to drop such a bombshell as restricted access with pre-orders and a limited launch they should have known these things and had them be ready to answer straight away - or better yet tell us from the start openly and clearly.

This whole thing has just been done incredibly poorly, plain and simple. Nothing more to say really.

That's the single most overlooked aspect of Stephen Reid's comments.

Never did they say players who purchased the game from other regions not given a standard MMO launch, with local server included, would be excluded from the game, entirely.

I doubt SWTOR is going to ip block anyone.

You may not get a local launch if you're from certain countries in the EU, South America, Asia, Oceania, Africa, but that just means you'll probably have to play a US/EU-localized client, unless/until BioWare creates a localized client and server for your respective regions.

This is really no different than what happens in many MMOs.