The Old Republic International Delay Met with Outrage

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http://pc.ign.com/articles/118/1183701p1.html?_cmpid=ign1392


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Star Wars: The Old Republic fans have reacted with outrage that the BioWare MMO will not be available in the Asian or Oceanic regions and portions of Europe at launch.

Commenters flooded web forums with extremely negative opinions on publisher EA's decision. The BioWare forums attracted well over a thousand comments in 24 hours.

For example IGN commenter Joshua_Ex wrote:

I've pre ordered the CE edition of Amazon the moment it was announced. Now I've read a lot of threads on the official TOR discussion website, and found out that many have reported there will be an IP Block system of some sort. For two years I have been keeping tabs and saving for it. Now I just found out that the pre ordered I made would be useless. I've never felt so betrayed.

Indeed, it seems there is some confusion about whether importing the game is a possibility. Commenter ShushKebab on Kotaku had this to say:

The game is able to be pre-ordered over Amazon if you live in Australia - except for the Collector Edition which has run out. There doesn't appear to be an IP-block if you play from Australia (judging from what a TOR developer has said over Twitter), and the fact that you can choose to play on American or European server doesn't exactly mean that Australians cannot play the game.

Otherwise, I'm still disappointed by the fact that us Australians have been shunted to one side by EA or BioWare (whichever made such a decision), and at least would have liked some notice for a game which I've been eagerly awaiting for a few years.

Stephen Reid, BioWare community manager tweeted:

On IP / region blocking. Current plan is no blocking. However am going to do more research to be 100% sure. Also, this is mentioned in FAQs.

And a later tweet…

Sleep soon. Please understand on IP blocking stuff, I will investigate, doesn't guarantee I am right or you will like answers.

No definite answer has arisen for players in excluded regions who have pre-ordered The Old Republic, but it is worth also remembering that no specific data about the delay (for example, are we talking about a delay of weeks and months or just hours?) has been released. The question on most people's minds is "why is there a delay in the first place?"

Translation could be an issue, as well as a desire to avoid any launch day server catastrophes. It may be that EA has failed to secure the correct server infrastructure for such a wide variety of countries spread around the globe. In Australia, for example, home broadband connections are able to download and upload at about one tenth of the speed of standard North American broadband. And when huge volumes of data are traveling overseas (as is the case with an MMO with off-shore servers), all of that data ends up traveling through one or two bottlenecks. The end result for Australian players, especially for a title as heavily populated at launch as The Old Republic is expect to be, is massive, almost unplayable lag.

It's an avoidable situation though, and to steer clear of the sort of rough launch, EA needs to negotiate well ahead of time with global ISPs to ensure enough dedicated broadband is available for their game. Even when servers are off-shore, as is the case with Blizzard's World of Warcraft Oceanic servers (which are still situated with the rest of the North American servers), peak data usage through a small number of pipes still has to be factored in.

Is it fair? Maybe not, but that's not necessarily BioWare or EA's fault. The alternative is worse -- you could be paying for a subscription on a game you can't play anyway.