Harmonized Regions and Servers

yokyoka

Hi.
I'm a player from one of the countries which desperately need harmonized region prices. But I have concerns regarding the server locks. My MMORPG friends are from European and North American countries. I'm the only guy from a possible harmonized server in our friend group. I really want to experience the game with them in those server regions but on your Wiki page, It says harmonized servers won't be able to play together with other servers. Will it be changed? Other MMO's and services have done it and allowed users to interact with each other. I want to socialize with my friends while playing this game and I don't want to miss anything out.

Tyranthraxus

Yours truly hasn't followed server-rules, up to this point. Won't we be able to play on whichever server, or is this literally regulated by IRL world regions?

You may get a lot of lag versus playing on a more-localized server, but I suppose you could get a VPN or a IP-address changer and change it to a different region. Or does this somehow mess with the price you'd be paying? Not entirely certain as to what you mean by servers not being able to play together with other servers.

From what I've seen, there *might* be cross-server PvP match-ups, but there won't be a Dungeon GroupFinder function - neither for same-server match-ups, nor for cross-server match-ups.

unknownsystemerror

So here is how it is going to happen as of right now. Regular subscribers will need to pay around $15 US dollars per month to play Ashes of Creation. There is NO region locking planned or IP restrictions for those accounts. If you live in India, Brazil, Iceland, or anywhere else and want to play on a server in the US or anywhere else, regardless of ping, go for it.

But, not all countries are created economically equal. For those the $15/month is determined by Intrepid to be too much of a burden, they will offer "harmonized pricing". So if you live in a place where the monthly average income is say $200 (yes, there are such places with gamers) Intrepid can adjust the pricing to lower in that region, to say $3/month (not the determined price, just an example).

Now, those players in that region, WHO CHOOSE THAT OPTION, will be locked to servers in that region. They will not be able to play in all regions. Why? Because in the age of VPNs and everyone literally trying to save or scam money, people living in economically rich areas would just VPN their accounts from the poor region to pay their sub, and then play on the rich region servers, thus gaining a massive discount not intended. Steam does similar with its region locking and you can lose you entire account when found to have been circumventing currency/region locking to gain monetary discounts. This is just one example.

So once again. If you are from Egypt (just an example country, none of the regions/countries have been announced) and they offer harmonized pricing, you can choose to pay $15/month and play on any server you choose, or pay $3/month(example) and be locked to playing on a server that serves Egypt. Whether that would be a single server, or a group in that area is also not known.

Hope this makes it more clear.

ShadonSol

I don't think Steven gave an official reason as to why they decided to lock users paying harmonized prizes to regional servers. Unknown gave a good example of a possible reason, so I'm going ahead and closing this thread now, but please feel free to reach out again if you have any more questions!