News: Resolved - PS2 Region

[Wakken]

Before weekend we will not have an answer. Sorry about it but the Technicans needs to figure out things first.
If the idea works out we will have no barriers for everyone but we need to see and wait what is possible.

Before abandon and run away I would wait as the idea we have in mind really solves a lot.

Wouldnt that technically mean we wouldnt need to create new accounts for ProSieben if we live in EU?

[Mastachief]

Localised servers are very welcome but they must be accessible to all. Lots of people have already said it.

Some North American players like to play with Europeans on a euro server because :
*Work Schedules
*Culture differences
*Game play style differences
*Long established online friendship
*Military serving in Euro countries

(this of course goes the same for euro players on U.S servers)

While some international servers in say Iceland or London would be cool this does not really bother me.

Other concerns are:
*Pro7 cashshop prices. Say my noobhammer of death costs $20 in the soe shop i don't want it to cost me £20 in the pro7 shop or for that matter £30. (current £/$ rate is 1.5)

*Credit/debit card details, Pro7 have a worse record than SOE for losing these it seems.

*What happens to any purchased items should pro7 shut the server down.

*The subject of patches, updates, testserver, dev feedback and expansions. Do we get them/access to them, what will the localisation timeframe be? 1-2hours / 1-2days / 1-2weeks / months.

- Development feedback and interaction, so far the level of interaction with the SOE Planetside 2 dev team has been unprecedented for such a large and important studio. I would hate that us Europeans as 2nd class customers would miss out on the future of this.

-Beta, I have always suspected that Europeans would miss out on beta and i think in the light of this deal i would like some reassurance that we will not miss out on such an important part of our games development.


-I have alot of fond memories not to mention input from the test server in the early years it will be a great shame if its a north american only feature.

[Shogun]

great that the everquest players freak out as hard as we do!

i think eq2 was more successful then planetside, so a boycott on this game may really be a punishment!
ps1 accounts cancelled don´t do any impact because the game was going to die when ps2 beta starts anyways. who would pay sub for an old game when the successor is free to play?

hamma, could you make a locked thread and edit in the news we get from soe and pro7? this thread here is hard to follow with all the ranting between the constructive posts.

so if they really sort out the server restrictions, there are still some concerns left we could use info on!

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will we eu players with soe account be able to use this account, or are we forced to transit to pro7?
because soe already has my personal information, but i don´t want to give that information to any additional companys and especially not to one that doesn´t seem to care about being hacked. sony and soe have surely learnt their lesson about security, because another hackerincident like the one last year would kill any confidence. pro7 may be one of the next target companys for the hackers, and they got no experience to fight them off. so it´s almost guaranteed our information will end up stolen by hackers sooner or later.

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will pro7 be able to change payment models, cash-shop prices, or even content?
will this deal mean we will get our patches later, or even miss out on patches, expansions or shopitems?

if only one of this questions gets answered with "yes", i will try to get into the original soe game by all means, and if that´s impossible i will not even play the game or any soe or pro7 game again. the ps2 devs made a great game and put a lot of effort into fulfilling our wishes and making this the best game ever. any changes by externals - and i mean ANY changes - are blasphemie! we fought out some things with the devs and don´t want to have to do this again with pro7 just because they break the game.

-------

final word: i´m impressed that our devs follow this thread and that some of them even read every single post! i have tried to do the same, but i admit that i skipped some pages!
devs, you are the best! please always keep in mind that for most of us you are OUR DEVS and not soe ;-) so whenever we rant about soe, please don´t take it personal! we know you are part of soe, but we don´t want to think about that ;-) for me the evil part of soe are the beancounters, not the developers!

[Shanesan]

Originally Posted by Fenrys

Hundreds of years worth of EQ2 subscription cancellations may have helped things along

Good. SoE only brought this upon themselves as a stupid company that really makes stupid decisions for the whole of the company as well as the community.

I'm also glad to see that people voting with their money works in practice. The political forum would be shocked.

Of course we should not praise them if they change their mind and work out a solution. They did this to themselves and deserve no thanks. The money spoke to them, so we spoke to them back with our money. Our money was louder. They do not deserve to be praised as heroes when they were villains first.

[Vancha]

Originally Posted by Shanesan

Of course we should not praise them if they change their mind and work out a solution. They did this to themselves and deserve no thanks. The money spoke to them, so we spoke to them back with our money. Our money was louder. They do not deserve to be praised as heroes when they were villains first.

As I said, anything less than EU and US servers on the same server list is a regression. The amount of money SOE must have been getting from PSS1 to implement such an archaic system for games that could only suffer from it must have been truly immense.

[Boomzor]

Originally Posted by Shogun

hamma, could you make a locked thread and edit in the news we get from soe and pro7? this thread here is hard to follow with all the ranting between the constructive posts.

I support this.

On another note; splitting communities is a very very bad idea. Not in the least for pro7 who are trying to break in on the bigger market. Oh boy. You'll be starting out with angry and disillusioned customers. You know, the ones upset about how you've ripped them away from their friends over seas.
Even if they do try out the game, and here's the million dollar question, how long do you think these will stay around after the novelty of a new game wears off?
Further, with how much fervor do you think these people will promote your new game?

Certainly not to the extent where you'll make money off of them or ride the social snowball effect they have the potential to create.

It's no secret that MMO's of any kind need a critical mass of players to be attractive, and above all, to STAY attractive.
The communities are what keep people playing. Browse around a bit (IGDA's a good start if you're interested) and you'll find papers from some pretty smart people who's established this for a fact, time and time again.

[snoopdog]

A friend and I who live in Switzerland have been waiting eagerly for PS2. I re-subscribed to PS1 and he even bought a new gaming PC in anticipation. But this US/Europe split is a game-killer for us. PS2 will be guaranteed to die before it even gets started. We have both suffered, first from the lack of players on the original European server, then from the long ping times on the U.S. servers after servers were combined. But... given a choice, we would prefer to have a game full of players and suffer some lag than play a game with few players in it. The massive number of players is THE thing that makes PS interesting. I also have friends in the U.S. with whom I play both PS1 and EQII. Europeans don't share a common language. The Germans are presumably the biggest game market of the European countries, but the English, Spanish, French, Germans, and Italians don't mix much. Cutting European players off from U.S. players will not change that. If in the past, we could not get enough European players to support a single server, then supporting a language-specific server for Spain, France, England, Germany, and Italy, for example, is a lost cause. So we'll be left with just a German server. Too bad for the players in England, eh?

Sony has disappointed me. The inventor of the Walkman and some of the first portable CD players has been left in the dust by Apple. Sony laptops look nice, but are mediocre in performance and over-priced. Sony still thinks they have pricing power due to the cache' of their name, but they actually don't. Sony products are not sexy anymore. The only bright spot might be the PlayStation, but letting themselves get hacked left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. Now this. What happened to you Sony? Are you trying to systemically destroy your company?

[DeathHaze]

hamma, could you make a locked thread and edit in the news we get from soe and pro7? this thread here is hard to follow with all the ranting between the constructive posts.[/QUOTE]

Do you suggest multiple topics on the same subject then? Should we not be discussing this in one area, to present SOE with one link full of our thoughts?

[Shogun]

Originally Posted by DeathHaze

Do you suggest multiple topics on the same subject then? Should we not be discussing this in one area, to present SOE with one link full of our thoughts?

no i don´t... first read, then think, then answer... don´t leave out the middlestep!

i want a locked thread where NO discussion takes place and where a mod enters the information we get from soe or pro7 about the issue.

unaware players come here, see over 800 posts and only read the first few pages before they skip and start to rant! we got several answers from soe and pro7 that are not even seen by most people. and it´s impossible to check over 800 posts for the 4 or 5 informational answers we got.

instead of a new thread hamma could edit the OP and put in the official answers there, to catch on the unaware new readers

[texico]

Woo wo wo, I don't think just taking down the barriers is enough. In fact it might cause problems. Everybody living in Europe is going to flood to the American version, i.e they're going to have bigger populations, bigger fights etc.

You'd be compelled to go there to get better fights and better service, but you'd then have to deal with ping, which is unfair. If you want the decent ping, you'd have to put up with potentially smaller fights and dealing with Pro7.

[Boomzor]

A typically bad example of this is the BF3 weapon/vehicle feed back threads for PC on battle log.

6000+ posts and not the faintest clue about what has already been pointed out or addressed.

We need the readers digest version of this thread.

[Mirror]

Originally Posted by Mastachief

Localised servers are very welcome but they must be accessible to all. Lots of people have already said it.

Some North American players like to play with Europeans on a euro server because :
*Work Schedules
*Culture differences
*Game play style differences
*Long established online friendship
*Military serving in Euro countries

(this of course goes the same for euro players on U.S servers)

While some international servers in say Iceland or London would be cool this does not really bother me.

Other concerns are:
*Pro7 cashshop prices. Say my noobhammer of death costs $20 in the soe shop i don't want it to cost me £20 in the pro7 shop or for that matter £30. (current £/$ rate is 1.5)

*Credit/debit card details, Pro7 have a worse record than SOE for losing these it seems.

*What happens to any purchased items should pro7 shut the server down.

*The subject of patches, updates, testserver, dev feedback and expansions. Do we get them/access to them, what will the localisation timeframe be? 1-2hours / 1-2days / 1-2weeks / months.

- Development feedback and interaction, so far the level of interaction with the SOE Planetside 2 dev team has been unprecedented for such a large and important studio. I would hate that us Europeans as 2nd class customers would miss out on the future of this.

-Beta, I have always suspected that Europeans would miss out on beta and i think in the light of this deal i would like some reassurance that we will not miss out on such an important part of our games development.


-I have alot of fond memories not to mention input from the test server in the early years it will be a great shame if its a north american only feature.

Exactly this!

[Mirror]

Originally Posted by Fenrys

Hundreds of years worth of EQ2 subscription cancellations may have helped things along

They have been reading this forum aswell because they quote Dart in the second section.

It's good to see the entire community come together in times like these.

[Vancha]

Originally Posted by texico

Woo wo wo, I don't think just taking down the barriers is enough. In fact it might cause problems. Everybody living in Europe is going to flood to the American version, i.e they're going to have bigger populations, bigger fights etc.

Plenty of EU players picked Werner over Emerald or Markov, so I don't think this'll be that big an issue unless PSS1 are this generation's GOA and actively push people towards SOE due to providing terrible service.

That said, you're right to an extent. People who play an MMO want to be part of it's global community. That's the whole reason segregation makes no sense for an MMO.

[ItsTheSheppy]

I can't imagine at this point that region locking will be left on the table. It isn't very often that you can see a community come together against something quite as unanimously.

It's reasonable to assume that, yes, if players are allowed to choose any server they wish, the US-East Coast servers may end up the 'place to be' and the Euro servers may find themselves with lower populations. However, there are a few things to consider:

1. Some folks may prefer to play on a less populated server.
2. Let the free market decide. If people wanna sacrifice ping for pop that's their choice.
3. The international mixing pot that was Emerald was one of PS1's more charming features.
4. Region Locking the game is dividing & conquering your own population. Not many video game success stories begin with the phrase "Well we started off by segregating our regional populations..."
5. When given the choice between forcing poeple to have what's good for them, or leaving it up to them to choose for themselves, ten times out of ten people will opt for options and freedom of choice.
6. SOE, If Pro7 demands region locking as part of the agreement, they are not your friends and don't have your best interests in mind.

I cannot imagine after this backlash, coupled with similar catastrophies in the EQ communities, that region lock will make it out of this deal alive. SOE would have to be a truly suicidal company to stay the course on this.

Then again... SW:Galaxies, BFRs... you never know...