Monday, August 17, 2009

Some EU countries will not be allowed to play Aion on EU servers !

Shocking news to me, the following 3 EU members will not be allowed to play on the EU servers :

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania

They will even be IP blocked ! And forced to play on Russian servers ...

I think this is outrageous, the least NCSoft can do is allow these countries to buy an EU version and let them to play on EU servers.

Here is a link explaining the situation :
Open letter to NCSoft

edit : Unconfirmed sources claim that the IP ban won't be in effect anymore. This is good news and a reasonable solution. I'll try to find confirmation.

6 comments:

  1. Sorry for long comment but it is directly related to this issue:
    Rummors that Lithuania and some other EU countries might fall under administration of Innova corporation have been spreading over the internet since the second Closed Beta event.
    Despite the fact, that there were no official statements on this case, some NCsoft GM have told, that Lithuania will definitely become a forced member of Innova game regions.
    It means that we won't be able to connect to European servers as we will get IP bans (all country) and will be forced to play Russian Aion game version. We guess that even donate shops will be included (as they were included in Lineage2 Russian version).
    Lithuania is member of European Union and if you would look at the map, you would see that we are geographical centre of Europe, not centre of Russia.
    We are not accusing NCsoft of selling us to Innova, we are just asking not to do so.
    If you would like to support us, place your vote in: [url=http://aion-lithuania.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=83&p=544#p544]Aion Lithuania • Temos rodymas - Balsavimas u? laisv? pasirinkim?[/url]
    Vote for "Ne" if you care, that EU countries can't play in European servers.

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  2. They're saying it's due to legal reasons.

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  3. Well yes, the legal reasons NCSoft created when they signed the contract with the Russian publisher "Innova Group" and included the rights for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

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  4. They should be taken to the euro courts and fined.

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  5. The problem is that currently, one is allowed to make seperate license agreements per country. There are people busy making laws that forbid this in the future. But these laws are in a package and some of them have some other, less wanted, features ( like a warranty system for software, lol ), so there is of course some discussion going on about this.

    Hmm, however, there probably is some law that forces having a native language or european language available ... I will go look for that :p

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  6. They already removed that restriction.

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