Blizzard bringing Global Play to StarCraft II “in coming months”
By Tim Colwill on November 12, 2012 at 8:40 pm
Get ready to battle outside of your region, as Blizzard are promising that global play is on its way to StarCraft II soon — in the coming months, in fact.
Global play will allow you to change your region at the games’ login screen, and each region will be completely seperate with its own characters, profiles, ladder rankings, friends lists and progress. “Global Play will give you access to StarCraft II game servers in regions outside your own,” writes the official release, “expanding the possibilities for eSports, exposing you to maps and games that aren’t yet published everywhere, and making it easy to play with your friends in other parts of the world.”
Blizzard are promising more details soon.
Source: Battle.net
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Good! No idea why they locked us into regions in the first place.
Even worse that the custom maps were also locked to the region they were uploaded from.
Nothing too big for us really, we got the ability to switch between AU and US luckily, I doubt most of us would want to play anywhere else except perhaps maybe the UK?
It’s a big thing for those who are waiting to be able to get the game at a fair price from overseas. Along with those who already purchased said copies without knowing about the restrictions.
syncourt,
probably to ensure a certain quality of service. don’t want people playing on US or KR and thinking the game is shit because of lag. yes, people are idiots.
vand,
there are typically different playstyles between regions, especially the world and korea. it also gives people looking for a challenge to play against korean players.
Haha how could I forget Korea, for some reason thought they were in the SEA region :P derp.
man this took way to long
2 years to late
and i like to go on other regions for the custom maps. Australia custom maps blow
I have no idea why this kind of thing isn’t a launch feature any more, I’m getting sick of buying games only for the full features to be implemented 3 years later once I’ve lost interest.
Companies need to either start getting this shit out near launch or just not bother, does anyone really care anymore about features for games most of us got sick of a year or more earlier?
Like all regional restrictions, it was implemented solely to stop grey market imports, so people had to buy it from their own regions stores at full price. This is literally the only game I have paid more than $38 for in the last 4 years solely due to the region restrictions.
This is very much in the interests of blizzard, as they could sell the game to different countries at different affordable (for each country) price point without having everyone else importing it from the lowest price country. This is really the only practical way to make money off the second world entertainment market, without lowering first world region profits.
They have quite possibly made alot more money from this sales strategy, though it may not have been as successful as hoped considering D3 had the restrictions reduced right from the start. You can bet Blizzard never release this kind of sales info however, so the actual sales success of this strategy will probably never become public.
Realistically they would only be removing it now due to their marketing team deciding that everyone who is going to buy it for full region price has, and they can get a PR win by now removing the restriction (pitched as adding a ‘new feature’)
These region restrictions are never implemented with any intent of actually providing a better player experience, though they usually get dressed up as such by marketing people.
i probably would have buy 4 copys by now if it wasn’t blocked by region. i have friends in many different country’s that i would love to play with. it also didn’t help that i couldn’t play with any friends i had made on wow….
better late then never i guess :O
I’d like to play with a mate from Europe, so this means I’m going to buy SC2.