Do not import World of Warcraft

Several people brought this bad news to my attention: If you happen to live outside of the United States of America or Korea, you will be unable to play World of Warcraft this year. Interview with Chris Sigaty from Blizzard to be found on WorldofWar.de. On the official beta WoW forum (scroll down to the blue text on the middle of the page) this has been confirmed as being true.

Only way to work around this is to somehow get hold of an American credit card, as access control will be based on your billing address, not IP address. Blizzard claims to be working on a solution to let Europeans play on the US servers after the European release, which is to be somewhere in early 2005, around 3 months later. This is supposed to address international guilds, but frankly, the US members of these guilds are NOT going to wait that long, and after 3 months the level difference will be far too big to group. Blizzard also failed to explain why they are able to release a completely localized Korean version of their game simulataneously with the US release, but unable to release at least their unlocalized English version in the UK. Last time I checked they were still speaking English in the UK, even if it sounded differently than American.

In contrast look at the following statement from SOE about the servers of EQ2: "Players in Europe will be able to play on any of SOE’s EverQuest II servers, including those servers based North America". Well, seems somebody else decided for me what I will be playing at christmas.

[Edit]Another official confirmation that you can not play WoW outside North America with an imported copy is found here.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:58 PM Permanent Link