Is regional blocking(for non technical reasons) is a form of racism?

[Costia]

so its fine to discriminate against a certain set of people based on their country of origin if it makes economical sense?

except there not stopping them from playing
there just stopping them from playing on servers based outside there region.

TERA for example are stopping you from playing on any server. Even if you are close to them and have no latency problems.

 

[direkiller]

so its fine to discriminate against a certain set of people based on their country of origin if it makes economical sense?

except there not stopping them from playing
there just stopping them from playing on servers based outside there region.

TERA for example are stopping you from playing on any server. Even if you are close to them and have no latency problems.

There blocked to north american servers for the gold farming reasons
The Euro blocks seem to be for unrelated legal reasons.

I have a hard time believing Asia is completey blocked from playing the game seeing it's a South Korean game.

 

[spartan231490]

That's like saying that having different laws and forms of government from country to country is racism, obvious fallacy.

 

[RafaelNegrus]

No. i specifically wrote in that post that I am not comparing. It was an example of how racism can sound like the right thing to do...

And i am sorry to inform you, but i live in the middle east, and the internet connection here is no worse than in Europe. Looks like a lot of people are basing their opinion of the middle east on the footage they see from the American-Iraqi war. There are a lot of other countries in the middle east that don't get that much media attention - because there is nothing special there.
And again, this: "They are claiming that there are enough hackers and gold farmers..." . would it be fine if i didn't sell products to Africans based on the claim that a enough of them steal, making it not profitable to sell to them? Don't you think you would be morally responsible for judging on a case by case basis instead of blocking the entire region? I mean , just throw us all to jail and be done with it. I think that big, international corporations should have some moral responsibilities as well, not just financial ones.

I know that this is the current reality, still doesn't make it right.

I would settle for prejudiced rather than racist. I don't see how it is different when it is based on the country you live in.

Didn't catch that about not comparing, sorry. There are people who do that and it gets kinda silly pretty fast.

And I'm not basing this off of any footage I'm seeing, I'm basing it off the fact that when I'm here in the United States I am always in a wi-fi hotspot and when I went over to Jordan I suddenly only had wireless internet when I was at school. When I say that internet is not as ubiquitous as it is in the West, I'm not basing that off of news clips that I have seen, I know it's not a region only made of war-torn villages.

The thing about MMOs is that they need a huge number of subscribers, as they do incur a constant cost on the company. And while it would be nice if they could judge each person on a case by case basis, they can't, they don't have the money to and no one does. If they could make money off of it, I trust in the greediness of corporations enough to think that they would at least give it a thought.

As for the statement of "They claim that enough hackers and gold farmers...": we have no idea where they're getting their numbers from, or what measurements they might have at all. To really call this racism, that's what you would need.

 

[spartan231490]

so its fine to discriminate against a certain set of people based on their country of origin if it makes economical sense?

It's not their country of origin, it's there country of residence. If you consider blocking based on that to be discrimination, then so is one nation having a different legal system than another. further, country of residence in no way determines race.

 

[Costia]

so its fine to discriminate against a certain set of people based on their country of origin if it makes economical sense?

It's not their country of origin, it's there country of residence. If you consider blocking based on that to be discrimination, then so is one nation having a different legal system than another. further, country of residence in no way determines race.

The difference is that while living in a country i am responsible for its laws. i am responsible for voting for the politicians that support my cause and protesting against others. Corporations are not democratic. Are you fine with that? How far would you allow a corporation to go before you would say they are acting irresponsibly/offensively/immorally to get more money?
Actively blocking players based on unpublished statistics that their country has a lot of cyber criminals sounds fishy to me. Especially when they seem to claim those stats don't apply to china - where they can make more money. And even if it is true - in my opinion they just need to find better way to handle it - WoW didnt crash and burn due to farmers.
Would you feel more comfortable calling it nationalism rather than racism?

 

[MetalMagpie]

To me, this is no different to releasing a game in a restricted number of countries, which is something that happens all the time. There are many Japanese games that are never released in the Western market, but we don't see that as discrimination, even in cases where it would (arguably) make financial sense.

Spotify was (at first) limited to only certain countries. It's completely within the rights of sellers to only provide their products in certain regions.

If they were requiring players to prove they were white before logging on, that would be a little different!

I think it is different because the means of distribution changed.
In the past to sell a game in another country you would have to ship physical copies there.
Today all you have to do is not to block. If they did noting at all - they would be selling internationally. But no, they are actively preventing from specific countries from playing - and not due to financial or law reasons - they do it because they claim most of us are criminals - because we were born in a certain country.

I think the issue here is that just because a company can do something doesn't necessarily mean that they are morally obliged to do it. In this case, if this company believes that allowing those regions would mean they incurred greater expense (due to higher levels of malicious behaviour), then they have a perfect right to decide that they don't want to support them. It's their business; it's up to them to decide what makes financial sense. They aren't obliged to support all regions just because they could.

The company isn't claiming that most people in these regions are criminals. They're claiming that allowing those regions is likely to increase the level of malicious activity to a level that they do not wish to deal with. It's the old story of a tiny minority spoiling things for everyone else. But using the cry of "discrimination" to force companies to support regions that they don't think are commercially sensible is not the answer.

 

[Costia]

To me, this is no different to releasing a game in a restricted number of countries, which is something that happens all the time. There are many Japanese games that are never released in the Western market, but we don't see that as discrimination, even in cases where it would (arguably) make financial sense.

Spotify was (at first) limited to only certain countries. It's completely within the rights of sellers to only provide their products in certain regions.

If they were requiring players to prove they were white before logging on, that would be a little different!

I think it is different because the means of distribution changed.
In the past to sell a game in another country you would have to ship physical copies there.
Today all you have to do is not to block. If they did noting at all - they would be selling internationally. But no, they are actively preventing from specific countries from playing - and not due to financial or law reasons - they do it because they claim most of us are criminals - because we were born in a certain country.

I think the issue here is that just because a company can do something doesn't necessarily mean that they are morally obliged to do it. In this case, if this company believes that allowing those regions would mean they incurred greater expense (due to higher levels of malicious behaviour), then they have a perfect right to decide that they don't want to support them. It's their business; it's up to them to decide what makes financial sense. They aren't obliged to support all regions just because they could.

The company isn't claiming that most people in these regions are criminals. They're claiming that allowing those regions is likely to increase the level of malicious activity to a level that they do not wish to deal with. It's the old story of a tiny minority spoiling things for everyone else. But using the cry of "discrimination" to force companies to support regions that they don't think are commercially sensible is not the answer.

It is not always up to them. There are things they are obliged to do.
It would be much better for them financially not to pay their staff or overwork them (I think there were articles on this topic about Rockstar, and the Chinese company making iPhone parts). Financial sense shouldn't be the only concern of a corporation. There are things they have to deal with even if they don't want to.
In this case I think they are obliged to handle TOS violations on a case by case basis, since they released the game internationally, rather than blocking entire countries.

So what is in your opinion is the answer? using a magic wand to get rid of all cyber criminals? Keep blocking countries? Because if nobody cares - they will never even try to solve the problem. They wont invest money in developing bot detection and similar software. Its a lot easier just to block everyone. I think such issues are solvable - but require money - that the corporation is obliged to invest, the same way they invest in PR, customer support etc. If they are not forced to try and solve this - they won't.

 

[Bertylicious]

If you choose rocky road then you are discriminating against vanilla. That is what the word means. Doesn't make you a racist though.

I don't think this is a racialy prejudiced decision in the same way that I don't think it'd be a racist decision to not go to Mexico because I'm scared someone will cut my head off and bury me in the desert. In that I'm discriminating against criminals, not Mexicans.

 

[MetalMagpie]

It is not always up to them. There are things they are obliged to do.
It would be much better for them financially not to pay their staff or overwork them (I think there were articles on this topic about Rockstar, and the Chinese company making iPhone parts). Financial sense shouldn't be the only concern of a corporation. There are things they have to deal with even if they don't want to.
In this case I think they are obliged to handle TOS violations on a case by case basis, since they released the game internationally, rather than blocking entire countries.

So what is in your opinion is the answer? using a magic wand to get rid of all cyber criminals? Keep blocking countries? Because if nobody cares - they will never even try to solve the problem. They wont invest money in developing bot detection and similar software. Its a lot easier just to block everyone. I think such issues are solvable - but require money - that the corporation is obliged to invest, the same way they invest in PR, customer support etc. If they are not forced to try and solve this - they won't.

Of course there are some things a company is obliged to do. Pay taxes, not sell children's toys that cause certain death, and generally obey the law. But there is no international law that says a company has to release a product to every region it has the ability to. Dealing with TOS violations costs real money (due to employee time), so if the company views that it isn't financially sensible to release in a region, they don't have to do it.

The answer is simply that companies which feel equipped to release in "more costly" regions continue to do so, and companies which don't feel able to release in those regions don't. It's not rocket science. It's obvious that successful companies should always look to invest money, but how much money and what they choose to invest that money in is up to them.

If you want to put legislation in to force companies to support all regions they can possibly reach with a product, where would you stop? Are you also going to control what languages they release a product in too? Are they obliged to absorb translation costs as well as investigating more TOS violations?

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well since it isn't bound to race then it would be a form of bigotry, obviously you can be sure the accountants that payed for this system only think about the money and never the people.
So when they set a price in X region they can be sure that the consumer has no other options, and so those dirty Aussies will always pay 2x the normal price

 

[spartan231490]

so its fine to discriminate against a certain set of people based on their country of origin if it makes economical sense?

It's not their country of origin, it's there country of residence. If you consider blocking based on that to be discrimination, then so is one nation having a different legal system than another. further, country of residence in no way determines race.

The difference is that while living in a country i am responsible for its laws. i am responsible for voting for the politicians that support my cause and protesting against others. Corporations are not democratic. Are you fine with that? How far would you allow a corporation to go before you would say they are acting irresponsibly/offensively/immorally to get more money?
Actively blocking players based on unpublished statistics that their country has a lot of cyber criminals sounds fishy to me. Especially when they seem to claim those stats don't apply to china - where they can make more money. And even if it is true - in my opinion they just need to find better way to handle it - WoW didnt crash and burn due to farmers.
Would you feel more comfortable calling it nationalism rather than racism?

Ah, that's the beauty of capitalism, if you don't like what they're doing, you don't buy their products. And nationalism isn't really right either, it's not one nation attacking another. It's a cooperation choosing not to provide service in an area where crime is higher. Sounds perfectly legitimate to me. As a business, they have every right to choose who they provide their services to. Just like a store has the right to refuse service to anyone, so does a game publisher.

 

[Costia]

To me, banning an entire country is not an acceptable policy of moderation. It is not acceptable because it is a collective punishment based on country of residence - has nothing to do with the specific violators. It is quite possible that the a lot of the real hackers are US citizens using Asian proxies so they won't get caught.
Sure it's legal and makes the more money for the corp, but its still nasty.
Maybe the case of TERA will be the first among many. The next time someone from Texas or whatever breaks the TOS, maybe they will just decide to block the entire ISP since they didn't have much subscribers there anyway. I am sure that you won't be so forgiving when it will come to your personal discomfort.
I never suggested making any laws. I think that issues like these should be raised frequently in the game developer's forums as bugs/feature requests until they will see that it is important to care for customers, and not just make as much money as possible.

PS
I am not sure a store owner here is allowed to refuse service to anyone without a reason.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

I stumbled upon this from tera:

"En Masse will block IPs based on region. Asia, Africa, Russia, and the Middle East are included on the block list. While we appreciate that there are players in these regions who would enjoy playing on En Masse servers, it's unfortunate that the vast majority of Internet traffic we see from these regions are from cyber-criminals relating to account theft, gold-farming and other hacking behavior."
It basically says that as far as far as tera is conserned all arabs, russians , africans and other asians are hackers, and should not be allowed to play. (while it seems that china is not blocked - which would make a bit more sense for the technical point of view)

They're not saying that "all arabs, russians, africans, and other asians are hackers." They're saying that a high enough number of the people who would play the game in those regions would be doing so for less-than-legal reasons, making it more viable to simply scrub the entire region and not have issues with them.

Is it unfortunate for actual players in those regions? Yes, very much so. And in an ideal situation (not even perfect, mind you) the developers would just put more effort into crackdowns on illegal activity rather than burning the source regions en masse.

So again: it's not a judgment against every person who lives in those regions. It's the often alarmingly true fact that many of the comparatively small audience who would play the game will be doing so for illegal reasons.