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General: Dana Massey: Regional Segregation
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
In this week's column, Dana Massey looks at regional services in MMOs. If it's so unpopular, why do they do it? What approaches would make more truly global games work? To find out, he spoke to veteran online game executive Scott Hartsman.
“As online games and internet usage in general has exploded over the past years, people have had more chances to become connected with others across the globe,” said Scott Hartsman, a veteran online games executive. “These are relationships they’ll want to carry into any game they play. Not letting people continue those friendships isn't progress - It's regression, and it’s one more potential barrier to having a game adopted.”
Take my father. Born in the 1950s, the only windows he knows about are on the front of his house. Computers were just never part of his life, but he is, in his own way, a gamer. The man loves chess and his biggest joy is playing people online. Why? To him it’s amazing that the computer lets him play a guy in Russia one minute and a guy in Thailand the next. The man types with two fingers, but he always asks where his opponent is from, and I’m not entirely sure he hasn’t marked them all off on a map somewhere. He even started getting up at obscene hours of the morning so he could play people in even further away places.
Read it all here.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
Read it all here.
I remember playing Shadowbane when it first came out. The second guild I was in(the first one disappeared when the leader quit and dismantled the city) was at least 75% Danish. I had a lot of good times playing with them, and we chatted on the differences of our respect countries/cultures. The only game I've played recently that had such a cultural mix was EVE.
In LOTRO there are many australian players but it isn't the same thing(no disrespect Dwellers of Oz but you are too close to American Culture to feel much difference). I miss playing with Europens, Those players from Asia seem to be less talkative and more into grinding for gold, etc. Anyhow just wanted to say there is a downside to seperating people on servers dedicated to 1 geographic area - that would be people(normal people) getting to know each other and seeing that normal people the worrld over are not that much different.
Great article, I wish that MMOs keep playing an important role in destroying these barriers. It's scary for someone that doesn't know a MMO or online gaming to even think about playing with people from any continent at any time.
Hopefully even ping issues might be reduced or even eliminated, and we may find ourselves playing even a FPS with people all over the world.
There's so many problems with different publishers for a same game - the different patches, possibly different bugs, different localization and only one developing team. Guild Wars and EVE have what I believe to be the best approaches towards a global server.
Loved the article, Dana. I totally agree with you. For the 4 years that I played Star Wars Galaxies. I was in a guild where we had Americans, Canadians, British, Japanese, and even Australians. I live on the East coast of the U.S., but I like going to bed like 4 am. So I actually used to play a lot with a guy from Australia, who would play just before he ate dinner in the evening in his time zone.
Which we had a lot of fun together, even though most of the guild would log log off earlier. So myself and few people that would jump on after I went to sleep, that were just waking up here in the states. Where the only people he got to play with, because of where his lived. Although the guild was on at different times we made sure to come together at time for guild meetings and events, such events at the Wookiee Life Day Event we had put on every December.
I really don't play SWG anymore, it not I dont like the game or the community. Its just become I've been there, done that.
When we get back from where we are going, we will return to where we were. I know people there!
After playing in the global communities of Ultima Online and Asheron's Call, I found it odd that MMOs started creating artificial divides in internet communities. UO was especially cool because you saw people talking in all sorts of languages with all different alphabets and you were truly cognizant of the worldwide community you were in. The MMO also offered SysTran which could translate language on the fly for you. It was a relatively crude system but it allowed you to communicate with people of other languages and origins than your own. Asheron's Call Morning thaw server, it was just truly awesome to hop on late late at night, recall to the Subway and hang out with the Germans and Swedes there. Again, the feeling that you were playing in an international culture was incredible.
What sucks about many of the newer MMOs is that they create a wall between a person and the international friends they make.They divide SEA, NA, EU, etc into separate groups for a range of reasons, which is disenchanting. I'm partial to the single-shard universe solution - getting past the regional segregation and forming one massive community of all the players.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
While this isn't the same thing, I feel like mentioning my experience on Xbox Live, specifically with Halo 3.
Whenever you go online and start searching for an online match, there's a map at the bottom of the screen, with a bright dot for each place in the world someone is connecting from, and a count of all the players online at that time. I feel this has a huge impact on the experience, as I never know where my next ally or opponent might be from. I've met many people from Europe and South America while I've played, and made some really good friends from other parts of the world I might not ever be able to go to, not just in Halo, but in other games.
When I played The Matrix Online, a large part of the community was from Europe, and they didn't keep us separated. I met people from Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, and some of those people I still talk to all the time, about anything, not just games.
In City of Heroes however, they keep the EU servers completely separated, and some of those very same people I met in MxO, I'm not able to play with in CoH, so I can definitely see where region separation is an issue. If we'd played City of Heroes instead of The Matrix Online, I'd never have met them.
As an Australian (and i think i can speak for the Kiwi's too) i don't give a toss what region/client i am playing, so long as the server is as close to me as possible.
Also to be perfectly honest, i found many intolerant people in the online world. (not being racist at all but) Typically Eastern and Western gamers don't really get along too well. Language barriers, cultural divides and negative stereotypes (chinese gold farmers...ect) lead to problems. In that respect i can see a need for a divide.
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
Well, the point though is not that they shouldn't have an Australian server. It's that Australians shouldn't be forced to play on it, and Americans, if they want, should be allowed to.
All games still require a good global network in that respect. I just see no reason to limit choice.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
In FF11, people in asia(Japan especially) were said to be able to pull a mob pop easier because they were closer to the server.
I never knew whether it was true, but I do know I am hella far away from the Japanese servers , so it sounds plausible. 1-2 second ping caaused a lot of aggravation to those who believed that asians had it easier. None the less, I am not sure I would back the segregated server idea... i am a guy who likes to play at all times of the day and I appreciate people always being on, and the chance to get to know people. It also logically increases populations on servers, which is good for economy.
WOOT
www.eorzeapedia.com
(Great FF14 source)
Well, the point though is not that they shouldn't have an Australian server. It's that Australians shouldn't be forced to play on it, and Americans, if they want, should be allowed to.
All games still require a good global network in that respect. I just see no reason to limit choice.
And why is that?
Let's say I make an mmo and I exclude China because my game is not made for an eastern culture and I'm not going to deal with their censorship BS like Blizzard had to go through ( and now Blizzard is being pushed out of Chinese territory by the Chinese government ). Who is anyone else to tell me I have to allow that countries players on my servers that are intended for the NA/EU players?
That's kind of a unique example and strays from the point of the article. Dana is talking about having servers in multiple regions and not allowing players to play in a region outside of the one dedicated to them.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
That's kind of a unique example and strays from the point of the article. Dana is talking about having servers in multiple regions and not allowing players to play in a region outside of the one dedicated to them.
Ah, okay. Thanks for explaining that.
the only game i have ever played that did a decent job at breaking the boundry is FFXI. of course there is always flaws, even FFXI has some due to it. the patch times are usualy the middle of NA day when JP are asleep (seeing as Square Enix is a JP company) and things like JP players having a split second quicker connection (wich can be sucky seeing as how this games end game has alot of big hunts that require you to claim them right as they pop).
what i do like is having more people from all around that you can meet, the pretty well done "translation" system in place and the fact that since its for all parts of the world the servers always feel alive and full of people no matter what time you play.
honestly id prefer having it that way, more people to play with and making friends from across the world. hopefully more MMOs do this, thought some of the issues listed in the artical (like server update times) cant be perfected until future implents are possibe (like the streaming updates and whatnot) or just wont at all.
I felt that his rp article was slightly abrasive as well, but he must have expected audiences to have that reaction. Im not even an rp-er .
WOOT
www.eorzeapedia.com
(Great FF14 source)
Well, the point though is not that they shouldn't have an Australian server. It's that Australians shouldn't be forced to play on it, and Americans, if they want, should be allowed to.
All games still require a good global network in that respect. I just see no reason to limit choice.
And why is that?
Let's say I make an mmo and I exclude China because my game is not made for an eastern culture and I'm not going to deal with their censorship BS like Blizzard had to go through ( and now Blizzard is being pushed out of Chinese territory by the Chinese government ). Who is anyone else to tell me I have to allow that countries players on my servers that are intended for the NA/EU players?
That should be up to you. That having been said, if your servers aren't in China, why should you care what the Chinese dictatorship thinks about it? IP bans fragment communities. Spellborn is a painful example of this. The Spellborn company has gone bankrupt now. They made too many bad business decisions. One of those was using IP bans at launch. But keep this in mind... The more you exclude, the more money you lose from potential players.
This is So True, I am Leader of an International Guild, we have many members from all over the world and one of the factors that affects what game we play is the "Region Blocks" as they call it because what's the point of playing a game if your friends/guild can't play with you? so developers should learn from this and stop the blocking madness.
I find it just a excuse control by the goverment..There is no reason why we all cant play..It is just that, there are different cultures and someone might find the truth..We all know what happen in Iran..Twitter went through the roof..And Iran took control of there own internets..Matter afact there was a write up; about terriost working through Internet games..But my whole point is..Dont believe everything they say why we cant play togeather.It is just a Control excuse..
Edit mod.spelling
Some people rob you at gun point..Others will rob you at "Ball Point Pen"
I quit FFXI pretty fast for many reasons but one giant one was that the vast majority of groups I found didn't speak english. While speaking strictly in game terms, the translator worked great. Once the group was started though it was as if I was playing with a group of NPC's with an occaisional <Congratulations!> when someone leveled. At first, when the game had a bunch of new servers, I could see where this might be cool if you had friends in another place or spoke another language and wanted to travel to those servers to play, but everything involved seems like it would be completely cost ineffective to worry about in order to satisfy a few niche players. Most people don't have top of the line gaming rigs and lag is one of the bigger complaints about games where a lot of people are in the same area. Add to that language barriers and its pretty easy to see why companies are more than likely not going to bother with the added cost of that kind of endeavor to make just a few people happy.
A good article - much better than the one last week (right now, I'm choosing to attribute last week's article to someone slipping an illegal substance in your coffee ;P ).
I have online gaming friends in Australia, the UK, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Russia and several other places I can't think of right now, and one of the things that really irritates me is that in many games, the US is on one server/set of servers, Europe is on another, and Asia is on yet another. That means that we are kept from playing the game with each other because in some cases, US players can only play on US servers, Europeans on EU servers and Asians on Asian servers. In my opinion, that is completely idiotic for a business to do: to limit themselves and their customers in such a manner. If I want to deal with the lag of playing on an Asian server, that should be my call, not the company whose services I am paying for (or, perhaps more properly, "renting access to").
Let's hope the various games up there catch up with the rest of 21st-century technology and leave the geopolitical stuff to other folks.
Firebrand Art
"You are obviously confusing a mature rating with actual maturity." -Asherman
Maybe MMO is not your genre, go play Modern Warfare...or something you can be all twitchy...and rank up all night. This is seriously getting tired. -Ranyr
I couldnt agree more every MMO with Regional Segregation is big turnoff for me.I think twice before investing any of my Money in that kind of BS.
One Reason i will always fallback to EVE is their "Global Server" no matter what time i log in their are always many People around.
8am or so EST is fairly less populated, but you are right in that there is always sumbuddy playing.
I don't think very many people are afraid of playing with people from across the globe, as they are in no actual danger by doing so. Localized servers are due to latency and publishing contracts. Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Pirates of the Burning Sea have, or had, separate servers based on publishing contracts. The reason is that the publishing contract had the publisher being the ones to host the game servers in their respective region.
Most MMOs just point you to the server that is closest to you geographically, which usually means it will have the smallest ping time. In the instances where there are separate publishers in different regions, and where the publisher is in charge of the servers, the servers for separate regions usually block those who are outside the region. It isn't based on some irrational fear of bumpkins from separate regions hating each other, it is because it costs much less money to keep separate contracts completely separate. You're not going to find too many companies who are going to agree to host players on their servers who are paying a seperate company (meaning the hosting company are not seeing any revenue from those players).
The segragetion is primarily based on contracts and money, which means there is very little chance of appeals from folks whith hippy dippy 'why can't e all get along' appeals of changing things any time soon. The best chance of having all our MMOs having servers open to everyone, regardless of region, is to have all our MMOs in the hands of multi-national companies. That would likley be a much worse situation than the way things currently are.
The upside of having segregated servers is that the censorship of one reagon doesn't spill over on the servers of other regions. WoW is censored in China. UO became Censored everwhere based on the censorship laws of certian regions (it is the reason corpse dismemberment was removed). There was worry, which turned out to be unfounded, that the Age of Conan was gong to have its pixelated boobs censored in the US. Do you think the folks in Europe would have a better opinion of the folks in the US if US censorship caused them to lose their pixelated boobs? My god, won't somebody think of the children?
Well, the point though is not that they shouldn't have an Australian server. It's that Australians shouldn't be forced to play on it, and Americans, if they want, should be allowed to.
All games still require a good global network in that respect. I just see no reason to limit choice.
well we are quite lucky down here and we are able to choose between the NA or EU version of games without too much hassle. If the Americans are only allowed to play on NA servers then yes, i see a problem. But the current system seems quite logical to me right now and even if you allowed everyone to play on any server, most people will flock to the server closest to their house (for low ping), basically the community segregates themselves instead of the devs doing it.
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
could start with "REAL"(R$) option on paypal, just cause i´m a south american black guy dont mean i cant buy ya rich boys game ¬¬
yeah, piss´d with MO ¬¬
now: GW2 (11 80s).
Dark Souls 2.
future: Mount&Blade 2 BannerLord.
"Bro, do your even fractal?"
Recommends: Guild Wars 2, Dark Souls, Mount&Blade: Warband, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.
As an EVE player, I've always found the global perspective interesting. Since EVE has only one server for the entire world (well, two, but the China-only one is due to Chinese laws), you get to chat with folks from just about everywhere. I have been in corps/alliances with folks from here in the U.S., Canada, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Croatia, the U.K., Ireland, France, Brazil, South Africa, Germany, Australia... Well, you get the idea. Hell, half of my current corp is comprised of Aussies.
Anyway, with the chance to talk with people from all of those different perspectives and cultures, it really broadens your own outlook. You start to see things differently, and can even end up reassessing certain long-held beliefs that you never thought to question before someone from a different culture said something that made you drag them out from under the rug and examine them.
-Wrayeth
"Look, pa! I just contributed absolutely nothing to this thread!"
Yes, having world server and so on is nice and all, but really other then for a very small minority this is not ideal. Here a coupel reaosn
1) if your not in the timezone that is prelevant on the server then odds are your going to end being bored and quitting (Take EVE North American playerbase as an example. It makes up what 4% of the userbase)
2) Server can only have certain number of players for most MMO. So if you don't control who gets on, MMO companies will loose money because they installed and place server in one region that won't be used as much, and they will have to buy new on in the other because people that should been playing in NA are playing in Europe. There's a high cost associated to this
3) there's a customer support aspect also. you try to limit as much as possible the impact to your user base. But if your userbase is widespread your going to end up displeasing one over the other. So this can lead to frustrated customer base and lost customer.
4) Some region will gain and advantage over another because of being closer to server. Lower lantency for example, which helps Japanese (or used to when i played FFXI) attack boss mob faster. This leads to irrate customer, and an irate customer generally ends up being a lost customer.
At the end of the day, the reason why MMO are segrated like this is not because MMO companies want to per say. It just make more sense econimically, financially and it mkes supporting and retaining your user base easier (GM don't need to know 6 language, or you have to wait till you get a GM that speaks your language to fix your issue). It just makes more sense, and personally i think it's a good solution considering that a very small minority would go play on another regionaly server if given a chance.