Aeria Games and Entertainment, one of the regional publishers/operators of Softstar's new free-to-play MMO Dream of Mirror Online, has announced that it is reluctantly going to have to IP block European users from the service from the commencement of the upcoming open beta.
Aeria Games is so reluctant, in fact, that they've started up a petition, and are encouraging DOMO players who take issue with the change to contact MMO developer Softstar. [Correction: Apparently these initiatives were started by the forum moderators who are volunteers and not employees of Aeria games]
The affected European region includes Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. European operations have been licensed to GameTribe, with Aeria Games (pending any further information) servicing the rest of the world.
Now, theoretically, this isn't any different to the regional system of titles like Flagship's Hellgate: London, but the problem that's really eating at the players right now is that so far, the beta on Aeria Games has been open to everyone, and many players are deeply unhappy that they will be unable to continue to play the game with their friends in the other managed region.
GameTribe apparently wants exclusive operations in Europe - which is the usual deal for this sort of thing - though it's normally done before everyone's spent weeks or months playing together in beta.
Aeria Games wants people to be able to use their service and server(s) even if they're on GameTribe's turf.
We'll keep an eye on what's going on with this struggle between the regional publisher/operators and keep you up to date on what's going on. We've been at the closed beta ourselves just recently, and while theoretically nothing's happened yet, Aeria Games' DOMO server 'Onyx' is suddenly not on speaking terms with me, as of this-morning.
