What is the purpose of a region lock? Is it a security thing?

What is the purpose of a region lock? Is it a security thing?

The region lock is probably for their data centers, and customer support. They probably want to keep them separate, and avoid a lot of issues. Its probably a hassle for them if you call support in NA but all your data is in the EU data center or vice-versa. Although it is the World Wide Web, managing data for mmo's across regions is still a pain since i'm assuming the server setups and infrastructures vary enough to make it a pain.

Secondly they probably want to avoid an influx of EU players on NA data centers, since the NA data center will cover NA, Asia, Oceania, and i have no idea if South America, or Africa are covered.

Way to make a misleading title.

Thought I wouldn't get to play with my European friends from the title.

Way to make a misleading title.

Thought I wouldn't get to play with my European friends from the title.

This seems like one of those realities of business. Sure, it's unfortunate, but a lot of planning has gone into how they want to go about structuring servers, and if enough people circumvent that then they might as well be tossing money into a furnace.

This isn't the only MMO to start region locking. Tera is also doing the same thing, locking out most of Asia, Russia, and Africa from the North American servers.

Unfortunately, it seems more and more like this has to be done to protect the accounts of legitimate customers, as well as curb spammers.

This is kind of a good thing. Americans playing on European servers will be somewhat laggy in PvP and vice versa.

Is this really surprising? WoW did it too, I thought this was the norm. You can still play on the other servers if you really want to.

Woah, so no JP/Korean data centre and, perhaps expectedly, no AUS data centre. I guess I'll be fine with defaulting to an NA DC, that usually gives me playable pings in the first GW.

Good to see that buy.guildwars2.com works no matter what.

It's likely more of a bookkeeping issue. They want a proper bottomline to measure against their upkeep cost for each region.

@UssjTrunks said:

@Subjugation said:

What is the purpose of a region lock? Is it a security thing?

So Europeans don't buy the game from the US where it's much cheaper would be my guess.

Or in the case of Norwegians like me, when you buy games from the US digitally (like TERA), you get taxed an extra $15.

as far as that thread title goes...

if free to play games region lock you from actually playing the game its anoying. but seeing how GW2 releases around the world on the same date. i don't really see a problem with this

I don't really mind that it's region locked, because it doesn't affect me but I can see why people who travel a lot might be worried. They've said that they're looking into solutions for that though.

@Rawson said:

This isn't the only MMO to start region locking. Tera is also doing the same thing, locking out most of Asia, Russia, and Africa from the North American servers.

Unfortunately, it seems more and more like this has to be done to protect the accounts of legitimate customers, as well as curb spammers.

You've been totally mislead by the title, you can play with anyone anywhere on any servers you like. You just have to buy a copy locked to your region to get access to your region's customer support.

@Benny: I understand that it's different than server region locking. However, let me explain:

I will be buying the NA version of the game. This presumably means that, in order to play on my account, one has to be connecting to the game in NA.

Now, let's say that a Russian person manages to get my account information, and attempts to log on and steal my stuff. He won't be able to, barring some proxy services that may not even work for the purposes of an MMO. This makes the region locking a form of basic account security. Sure, it may not work at protecting people all the time, but it's better than nothing at all.

@Benny: I understand that it's different than server region locking. However, let me explain:

I will be buying the NA version of the game. This presumably means that, in order to play on my account, one has to be connecting to the game in NA.

Now, let's say that a Russian person manages to get my account information, and attempts to log on and steal my stuff. He won't be able to, barring some proxy services that may not even work for the purposes of an MMO. This makes the region locking a form of basic account security. Sure, it may not work at protecting people all the time, but it's better than nothing at all.