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The Plight of Australian Players
Perhaps you're not aware, but Australian and North American World of Warcraft players share the same realms. This has created all sorts of troubles for the Australian player approaching the game. Firstly, sharing a game-space with North American players means that many players are in a time zone far separated from your own, and finding instance and raiding groups during the hours when most of the players are sleeping is a problem. Secondly, regularly scheduled maintenance, set during a low activity time for those on the right continent, hits right during prime playing time. While, more recently, Blizzard has been rolling out realms specifically flagged "Oceanic" and set to Australian time zones, they're still located with the rest of the North American realms and subject to the same maintenance schedule. And with few Oceanic servers available, they've become flooded with players and subject to lag and instability. Whether Blizzard will be able to fix its Oceanic mess or not... well, we'll see.[Thanks, Dave]
Dude, Where's My Country?
When we purchased WoW, we all made a (mostly) unconscious choice. Based on geographic location alone, we committed ourselves to life on a certain set of servers, walled off from other regions -- American, European or Korean, we're now stuck with the original decision we made months or years ago.There are various good reasons to think about switching, or going dual-region. It's possible to run two copies of WoW, or even just the one, as long as you're prepared to cough up the initial payment and monthly fee twice over. You might have friends abroad you wish to play with, or you may be away from your home country temporarily. You might be a night owl or early bird, more comfortable in a timezone several hours distant from your own. Perhaps there is a particular guild you wish to join, or news items you wish to keep up with; perhaps you would prefer to speak a certain language.There are also bad reasons -- if you're disillusioned with some less-than-savoury experiences on your home server, switching region isn't going to help any more than just switching server, as bad PuGs and antisocial players exist on all servers. Also, playing away from home for the purposes of selling gold or characters in a more lucrative market isn't going to win you many friends.
