global vs regional

viviflox

hi all ffxiv fans and mmorpg fans. i am curious about something? i was thinking of what makes good healthy player base and was looking on google but couldn't find any topic about this. for me i think ffxiv is successful because it is a global game, like wow, or like others in a way. for instance i really liked tera, aion, but i found them to be really lacking in updates and development outside of korea, like aion and tera have minimum 3 different games, 1 aion for korea with world 1st updates, than na aion following behind than eu the last. I find that kind of menagement hurting for those games. wow has blizzard ffxiv has se, and when the update comes we all get it in all regions of the world at the same time, they are the only ones that we pay for the game, and we are all connected. the same goes for a lot of other games that i didn't ,mentioned here, like star wars or guild wars. but for Aion Tera they will always have lower playerbase for me who is from eu because i am just seperated from na people or asian countries and i really hate that and we always get the last updates for them. i am afraid that  the games that i am expecting like Bless and Black Desert or Archage will follow the same route. Anyone have any ideas thoughts on this?

p.s. sorry for my bad english

Hyanmen

The last I checked WoW doesn't get simultaneous global updates as the Chinese version is significantly behind in the development cycle. Of course you don't see that but that doesn't make it any less stupid.

In comparison the Chinese ARR will be up-to-date as far as the development is concerned. The alpha/beta versions earlier this year were functioning on the 2.1 version of the game. This is with the Chinese ARR being handled by a third party too, so there is literally no excuses for Blizzard to be so incompetent in China.

But I definitely agree with you in that other devs are completely mismanaging their MMO's globally and that getting their games up to standard in this regard is the first step towards giving us the kind of customer service we deserve. It is laughable to discuss the pro's vs. con's of each games when everyone else is so hopelessly behind in their localization process and with Korean devs spitting on the West by giving us the barebone version of their game years later.

gervaise1

Not always straightforward.

With "big games / big companies" there may not be much difference. Smaller games however which take on partners to run a game in a particular region. Maybe the partner runs their own, different server architecture; maybe they have a say in when the local update should be released - to tie in with regional holidays that might help sales etc. All comes down to money / royalties, from who is responsible for bugs to who pays for any local translation. 

And even Blizzard is - sometimes - limited by what it can do; big one being release dates being mpacted by governments - maybe new content has to be signed off, if so Blizzard won't be able to dictate how long that will take - it can guess and try and manage whatever is needed but there is only so much you can do when dealing with government bodies.