News/20070305

March 5, 2007

European Players Denied U.S. Server Access

Important Note: To clarify, existing European players are still able to access the U.S. Servers. The following applies to new accounts and account upgrades only.

Players with European IP addresses are now unable to purchase game codes for playing on U.S. servers.[1] As a result, all new purchases of City of Heroes, City of Villains, and premium account upgrade options from NCsoft within Europe are effectively denied for non-European server access. This action was implemented without any advance warning, other than an announcement that the option to transfer accounts from U.S. servers to to European servers would be disabled[2], with no warning that new accounts and premium account upgrades would be denied to European players.

The motives behind this decision are subject only to speculation, but a post in the official NCsoft forums offering to facilitate Europeans obtaining codes for playing on U.S. servers was deleted. Since NCsoft doesn't wish for messages pertaining to such an offer to be posted on their site, I (TonyV) will echo it here:

If anyone wants to get a U.S. code, drop me a PM or e-mail me at tonyv@pcfreepress.com and we'll see if we can work out getting you one through PayPal or something. (But that's just a friendly offer; if I start getting hundreds of requests or people don't pay me back, I'll stop.)

If you wish to contact me via forum private message regarding this offer, please do so on the Paragon Forums instead of NCsoft's forums, as I do wish to respect their decision not to have messages of such a subject posted or sent via their forums.