Back when Bluehole announced that TERA would have no region restrictions whatsoever, I was admittedly skeptical. An MMO without regional restrictions generally spawns from one of a few circumstances: The same company is publishing it in all regions ala City of Heroes, or there is only one worldwide server ala Eve Online and Mortal Online. In the case of TERA, back in 2010 Bluehole announced that while the clients are region specific, there was nothing stopping someone in Europe from purchasing a North American client and playing on those servers.
Not the case. If Bluehole truly wanted cross-oceanic play, this idea was met with a dead “negative” by the game’s publishers. Bluehole did make this statement to Massively:
We had to change our stance on IP restrictions due to licensing and security issues. While we can’t go into the reasons in detail, we would like to say that although these restrictions are not a panacea for preventing hacking, they are highly effective, and produce more positive results than might be expected.
So licencing reasons. Restricting IP addresses will not accomplish much in preventing gold farmers in Russia or China from accessing North American and European services or stolen accounts, considering ease of use in a proxy. Unfortunately, these IP restrictions also mean that certain regions aren’t able to play the game until a publisher picks up the title in that region. In many cases, the game just never releases in those regions.
Still, this is another example of what happens when you let the developers make announcements about decisions that should be handled by corporate. If TERA had announced from the start that there would be region restrictions (or had they not waited a year and change to go back on that statement) than this wouldn’t even be an issue (save for the regions that can’t play at all).
TERA launches in May for North America and Europe and is being published by En Masse Entertainment (North America) and Frogster Interactive (Europe). Read up on Bluehole Studios’ lawsuit with NCSoft here.
MMO Fallout 