SOE opens up about multi-year European partnership

Region locks… seriously, this is 2012. We are a global community, both offline and online. We have friends from all over the world, we move, we work abroad, lots of us have family in other countries. What an awful idea.

As a European player, I want to keep playing on US servers and I want to stay a SOE customer, not an Alaplaya customer. I’ve always preferred to play on US servers, simply because more people tend to speak (an acceptable level of) English, global chat isn’t polluted by people who insist on speaking their own language, and there is no hostility between country-specific guilds. If you want to know what I mean, just go read the Alaplaya forums for a minute.

I’m relieved that my existing EQ2 characters (which are all on a US server) will be able to stay where they are now, but I have lots of concerns about this too: If I have a problem, will I still be helped by customer service? Will I be able to make new characters on my server?

And what after EQ2? When EQNext releases, I’ll never be able to play with my guildies, because most of them live in the US. Thanks SOE. :(

Region locks… seriously, this is 2012. We are a global community, both offline and online. We have friends from all over the world, we move, we work abroad, lots of us have family in other countries. What an awful idea.

As a European player, I want to keep playing on US servers and I want to stay a SOE customer, not an Alaplaya customer. I’ve always preferred to play on US servers, simply because more people tend to speak (an acceptable level of) English, global chat isn’t polluted by people who insist on speaking their own language, and there is no hostility between country-specific guilds. If you want to know what I mean, just go read the Alaplaya forums for a minute.

I’m relieved that my existing EQ2 characters (which are all on a US server) will be able to stay where they are now, but I have some concerns about this too: If I have a problem, will I still be helped by customer service? Will I be able to make new characters on my server?

And what after EQ2? When EQNext releases, I’ll never be able to play with my guildies, because most of them live in the US. Thanks SOE. :(

Smedley tweeted

"Lots of good feedback from our player base about our existing European community.. Guilds, servers etc. we will be discussing with Prosieben"

So maybe some kind of grandfather clause gets thrown in. Donno.

I don't want to move :(

Someone has posted on the official forums a link to what is claimed to be a public forum run by ProSiebenSat.1 giving the real names of those existing players whose monthly payment has, for whatever reason, failed to go through. That appears to be the level of company onto which SOE are pushing its European customers.

People who have had dealings with ProSiebenSat.1 are strongly advising against passing your personal and card details to that company.

That's me done with SoE.. I had just signed up for a station account as well to play a little Vanguard.

They are known for shafting their customers, but this really surpasses any of their previous on goals by an order of magnitude.

Pass cancelled and, I hope, my lesson learned for the last time.

sounds like bottom feeding business tactics to me.

expect it to get worse, with Planetside 2 and EQ .Next

This is without doubt the worst decision they could possibly make. It is very upsetting news. There is currently a 1300+ post forum thread on the EverQuest II official forums. There is not a single person in agreement with this decision in any of those posts. This is a terrible day for our community. I will miss my International friends.

I thought region locking and IP blocking was a thing of the past.