Aussie gamers not too happy with StarCraft II region-lock

Australian gamers aren’t all too happy with the decision of Blizzard to put StarCraft II under a region lock, thereby disallowing them from playing the game with players from North America or Europe. They can, however, play with those in Southeast Asia.

Australian gamers aren’t all too happy with the decision of Blizzard to put StarCraft II under a region lock, thereby disallowing them from playing the game with players from North America or Europe. They can, however, play with those in Southeast Asia.

Still, Australian gamers are up in arms over this selection because they find it more difficult to connect with Southeast Asia because of ping issues. A spokesperson for Blizzard Australia re-released a statement, originally sent out in April, to address this issue.

“Blizzard Entertainment also announced today that both the standard edition and Collector’s edition of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty will give players from Australia and new Zealand access to play on servers based in Southeast Asia, alongside gamers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. This local datacentre will offer players in the region improved latency for a high-quality gameplay and connectivity experience.”

It also appears that Blizzard is working on fixing the said problem of bad ping times to the SEA region having announced lsat week via the StarCraft Community Forums that:

“To help people trace to the correct location of the new SEA servers we have an IP and instructions that can be used to test your latency. We’re hoping we can then use that to gauge the connection speeds more appropriately. Please be aware that there will be timeouts for the last few hops, and that’s normal. At that point you’ve already hit our datacenter, but the server information will stop being returned after a certain point for security reasons.”

Any other concerns, such as language barrier, have also been covered already by the team. “In regards to some concerns over language barriers: the only version of the game being sold in Southeast Asia is the English version, and the majority of people are either fluent in English or are likely to speak English as a commonality.”

Via [GamePro]

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