StarCraft 2 regions linking to share players

Several SC2 multiplayer regions are being linked with a partner, letting players from each pair play against each other.

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Several regional multiplayer servers for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty are gaining new friends, Blizzard has announced. Later this month, they'll be joining with another to share their playerbases.

The North America and Latin America regions will be linked, while Europe connects with Russia, and Korea with Taiwan. Players in linked regions will be able to player with their new buddies, in custom games and in matchmaking, and be able to add them as friends. It'll help smooth things over for players in less-active regions. This'll happen when Season 3 of the StarCraft 2 ladder kicks off, which is currently scheduled for the week of July 18.

"Having a larger pool of players means the automated matchmaker for ladder games will be faster and more effective at finding opponents at or near your skill level. Similarly, more players means faster queue times for custom games, which benefits both players and map creators," Blizzard explains. "From a social perspective, players will be able to create character and Real ID friendships with people from the newly linked region, which they couldn't have before."

Blizzard insists that "There should be no impact on game performance," explaining, "All players in the linked regions will be connecting and playing through the same data centers that they were using prior to region linking, which is the main reason why linking these regions together is fairly straightforward."

Unfortunately the divide between regions is not being outright demolished. Australia and New Zealand are left in the lurch in the South East Asian region, and European players still won't be able to play with their American Internet chums. It's certainly still a welcome move, mind.

Thanks to Shacker 'Mandoca' for the tip.

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    July 12, 2011 6:15 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, StarCraft 2 regions linking to share players.

    Several SC2 multiplayer regions are being linked with a partner, letting players from each pair play against each other.

    • reply
      July 12, 2011 6:19 AM

      in other news, NA players quit due to the influx of cheese and teammates that go idle at the beginning of the game

      • reply
        July 12, 2011 6:23 AM

        I've heard a lot of dismay about this, are gamers from the LA regions really that notorious for just being shitty?

        • reply
          July 12, 2011 6:28 AM

          There might initially be problems and idiots, but that stuff will die out soon enough

          • reply
            July 12, 2011 7:06 AM

            while funny as fuck, doesn't really apply to games such as sc2

            • reply
              July 12, 2011 8:03 AM

              have you ever played a 2v2 with a really bad team mate?

              • reply
                July 12, 2011 12:57 PM

                No, but my team mates certainly have.

              • reply
                July 13, 2011 1:38 AM

                No, I hate playing 2v2 or whatever with strangers, it's pointless

            • reply
              July 12, 2011 8:32 AM

              In Starcraft one if I played against a Latin American Protoss I would 7 pool because he was 100% cannoning or proxy gating. 100%.

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            July 12, 2011 7:08 AM

            I've never come across this brazillian plague - what's with it? Why are they so bad?

            • reply
              July 12, 2011 2:03 PM

              I'm not sure it happened a lot on Counter-Strike 1.6 as well.

              I think most of them are young children which explains quite a lot.

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          July 12, 2011 6:37 AM

          nah, actually there are more NA noobs/cheesers than LA ones. it's just that NA players troll about LA players because they don't understand eachother in team games... i've seen it happen alot...
          the reason why is because of the internet penetration in Latin America vs North America. there is way less people playing online in these 3rd world countries than in NA... WAAAY LESS... therefore, the chances of getting matched with/against North American noobs/cheesers are much higher....

      • reply
        July 12, 2011 6:27 AM

        EU players rage at the influx of RU drophackers

    • reply
      July 12, 2011 6:30 AM

      I don't mean to look a gift horse in the mouth- but for fucks sake blizzard, the regions should never have been locked off as it is.

      It should've been 'preferred region: default' and 'your choice' (all of them)
      Sigh.

      • reply
        July 12, 2011 7:00 AM

        yeah, blizzard did not progress in this way... in the classic games (war 3, sc1, d2) you could switch realms whenever you wanted... now you're stuck... sure you could request a realm transfer, but then you wouldn't be able to go back to the other one.....

        • reply
          July 12, 2011 7:02 AM

          [deleted]

          • reply
            July 12, 2011 7:06 AM

            you can if you register in the NA realm, but then you cannot play against EU people!
            Fucking great isn't it?

            stupid as fuck

          • reply
            July 12, 2011 7:06 AM

            Correct, unless you buy an NA key instead of an EU key

          • reply
            July 12, 2011 7:07 AM

            If you buy an EU copy - you can not play with (most) shackers. Yes it's fucking stupid.

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              July 12, 2011 12:57 PM

              It's fucking stupid. But... I guess War3 and SC2 are the only RTS games with fluid netcode. No one else (not even Relic) seems to have figured that one out. That's huge. Perhaps Blizzard is actually right about the realms seperation?

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                July 12, 2011 4:26 PM

                of course they are. I don't want to get fucking matched up with someone on a different continent.

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            July 12, 2011 8:39 AM

            yeah. well blizzard said they were going to address this issue in the future. they already started to merge servers. i guess the next step is to let us be able to switch servers whenever we want to... like in the old games...

    • reply
      July 12, 2011 7:05 AM

      AHEUAHEAHEAHEAHUEHAEHAEHA GIBE MONI PLOS

    • reply
      July 12, 2011 7:25 AM

      As the guys here know I have a copy both for the EU and US servers, it's not the best solution, but it lets me play with friends on different servers. While I was angry at the time, I have played enough on either server to justify the cost.

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      July 12, 2011 11:04 AM

      Why not link the EU and US servers as they both natively speak english? Link RU and Latin as neither of them usually speak english. You could even throw china in there for good measure.

      Seriously, regions should be split up by language, not by location. Location definitely denotes server location, but often times it doesn't taken into account language barriers that prevent any sort of social interaction and sometimes actually destroy it.

      And yes, before you say people in US that speak spanish will pick spanish servers, you could simply use both attributes to give the best possible combination. I don't know why they don't let people pick their localization anyway besides for marketing and product segmentation. :l

      • reply
        July 12, 2011 11:51 AM

        Yeah I really don't get that at all. Why won't they let me play with my British friends? It doesn't make sense. I shouldn't have to spend another $60 to do so.

      • reply
        July 12, 2011 11:52 AM

        Part of it is due to latency (which is always a topic for international online tournaments) and other parts of it I'm sure have to do with marketing, population, and selling more copies.

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          July 12, 2011 2:07 PM

          A lot of it is region pricing as well. They don't want everyone getting the like $30USD Russian version then playing in america where they should have bought the $60 version.

          It's basically region codes like DVD's have.
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code

      • reply
        July 12, 2011 12:09 PM

        Haha, what? I play on EU and the majority of players I meet in Custom Games can't speak English at all. On ladder it's better, though.

    • reply
      July 12, 2011 11:55 AM

      brazilians are fucking assholes. worthless shithole of a country.

    • reply
      July 12, 2011 12:49 PM

      YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH

    • reply
      July 12, 2011 12:57 PM

      Things like this are why I fear for D3. Blizzard seems to have really screwed the pooch in terms of what made their previous games so damn memorable.

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        July 12, 2011 12:59 PM

        I certainly remember BW being great because of international battle.net servers, and not because the game itself was any good.

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          July 12, 2011 1:18 PM

          I feel it was a huge part of why Starcraft was great. I remember the firs ttime I beat a Korean in Starcraft; I was ecstatic. And opening up global servers introduces a much higher level of competition. But I'm not referring specifically to this one issue.

          Blizzard, to me, seems like they've really deviated from a lot of what, in my opinion, made their earlier games great. DIablo was an engrossing and difficult dungeon crawler. Starcraft had a good story, great characters, phenomenal gameplay, and an amazing community that Blizzard did nothing but encourage. D2 continued that trend, with the community becoming all important, with an excellent story and a really compelling world. WC3 was much the same, with even better presentation and writing.

          But once WoW hit it big, a lot of those things fell by the wayside, I feel. Story and community were especially unimportant in WoW and the story in SC2 was pretty junky too. Their region lock business, plus the lack of LAN play, were two more strikes against it. Maybe it's just that the times are a-changin', but I don't like it >:

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            July 12, 2011 2:14 PM

            Blizzard is my biggest Love/Hate relationship of any company ever now.

            They just do so many irrational things now. (from a consumers standpoint)

            But it goes so much deeper than just the stuff that you mentioned. It's things like the large number of lawsuits that they get involved in with their customers, many more than any other gaming company I'm sure. They just set a very very dangerous prescedent in suggesting (falsely) that loading stuff into a computers memory is copywright infringement.

    • reply
      July 12, 2011 3:48 PM

      [deleted]

    • reply
      July 13, 2011 12:27 AM

      Open the whole thing up.

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