Oceans apart

The first piece of discouraging news has made it to my doorstep regarding the eagerly anticipated Age of Conan.

If reports from the official AoC forums are to be believed, FunCom has made the all too common (poorly informed) decision to separate their playerbase according to location, much like WoW.

Rather than giving players their leave to choose from a multitude of servers and allowing them to create their characters on servers all around the world, FunCom will be releasing different client version for the different regions.

Four of them...

I still don’t know why developers insist on carrying out this archaic segregation. The majority of gamers, myself included, will doubtless have met many people from all around the globe who they regularly share their online time with.

The knock-on effect of this decision is that many guilds who were formed in different games may split due to not being able to reunite in Hyboria.

I know there are workarounds for this. People can simply go out and buy a different client from such sites as Play.com or Amazon. Again, this would take some co-ordination between existing guild members, but there are other factors to consider here.

As I understand it, current German politics do not allow for certain types of violence to be portrayed in their multimedia. As such, they have been given a client version all of their own which will not show a certain number of death effect animations.

I don't wish to get into the political side of this as I have my own opinions about the impact of gaming on society. The belief that some individuals harbour that, just because people play Grand Theft Auto, they will get the inclination to go out and 'pop a cap in yo ass' before stealing your car.

I mean...come on...are you serious?

Germany has their laws and that's that. In addition, it is my understanding that German citizens caught using software or media which breaches this edict are liable to prosecution. (Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong on this point).

Ok, so that's a reasonable cause to ship a different client to Germany. I feel your pain over there. I sincerely do.

But what about everyone else?

Is there any logical reason to prevent Brits, Americans and the rest of Europe playing together? I think not. In fact, both SWG and Tabula Rasa both gave players the option to choose where they wanted to start out. I, myself, played happily on the Sunrunner server in Star Wars Galaxies for several years. My average ping was about 185ms but it never made things unbearable. The fact remains that the system worked, people settled where they wanted and went on to play happily ever after.

Admittedly, latency can cause problems for some people and may prevent them from staying too long on a particular server. But from the reports I've received, players in the UK have managed a 140 ping to East Coast US servers. Not amazing, I grant you, but hardly unworkable.

Either way, people who really want to play together can reach a compromise. Mr California and Mr London can get together on a Chicago based server for example. I'm not even related to the games industry in any other way than as a consumer and even I can see the logic in that argument.

I guess my disbelief stems from the fact that, in this day and age of global communication, I don't understand why companies would try to keep people apart.

Come on FunCom...we wanna be together!