Just curious....why would Blizzard make a US server community and then a Europe one? Why can't both play together?
I see more folks from China play vs America and Europe. Does China have its own servers also? Why should we all be divided?
How did WoW become more popular in China than America, if it is based out of California, just curious.

Well. Some companies have started WoW related businesses such as gold-farming businesses. I'm not sure why people in China tend to be the workers of these companies....

But it's true. There are some videos online showing these people seemingly forced by their employer to bring in a certain amount of gold and they are taking shifts.

As for US / Europe. There is the obvious language barrier. (German?)

As for US / Europe. There is the obvious language barrier. (German?)

There are a choice of languages on the European servers... so players can go to an English speaking server if they want to. In fact many players from different countries go onto the English speaking server. It adds to the diversity... my guild has members from several countries and it's cool that I can learn some Swedish, German and Danish etc whilst leveling :wiggle:

Dingodog

The main reason for this is time zones. For example, Germany is 9 hours ahead of California. That causes some weird grouping. Australia is 19 hours ahead of us. Thats just weird (it's 9:58 am here, Tuesday 1/16/07. it's 4:58am in Australia, Wednesday 1/17/07.)

In our guild, we would raid at 6 server, and we had a couple people from London that were 8 hours ahead of us. That put it at 2am for them. Needless to say, it was weird for them playing on a Pacific Standard Time server when they wanted to find groups at a reasonable time for them.

The real reason is money. It takes a lot of people and a lot of equipment to run a WoW server farm. Due to latency issues, there need to be several around the world to cater to the large concentrations of players: North America, Europe, East Asia.... It's more efficient for Vivendi/Blizzard to contract out the construction and running of those operations centers to local companies who can more easily form and staff them, and manage that staff locally, than try to do it at a reach.

Since each region has its own billing rates and standards, and are operated independently, they have seperate pools.

I don't like the forced segregation - I think people should have a choice which servers they play on. For example, there are people in the US who are active during the day, which is peak European playing time.

I came to WoW from a mostly European guild that had members from America and Austrailia as well as Europe. It was a real shock to discover we were being forced to play on different servers. Sure, recommend local servers, but don't prohibit cross-server play.

Or maybe Blizzard just want people to pay for multiple accounts so that they have access to both US and EU?

Hugs.
Tiniane.