@Bawdawg: Unfortunately technical issues are not the only obstacle. There are legal issues and even technical issues resulting from those legal issues. Considering your note of two versions, I need to inform you that there are several more, I am not even sure how many exactly… Retail WoW exists in at least three (US, EU and Chinese) and possibly as many as six or seven different versions even disregarding languages… and there are at least two different versions of Classic on top of that (English and Chinese).
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I’m only talking about US/EU connecting here.
Yes, I know all about those and they where deliberately introduced by Blizzard when they developed the game.
EvO, EQ2, LotRO, Rifts, etc. can make a game that doesn’t have legal issues with regard to US/EU availability so I can only assume that Blizzard, for whatever reasons, didn’t want the US and EU players together in the same game.
I can appreciate a language barrier being a valid reason but that’s not the case with US/EU gaming.
I also realise that it’s not going to happen, doesn’t stop me from liking it to happen.
@Bagdagw: Actually, this is not entirely correct either… To my knowledge Blizzard was FORCED to retcon for example Brewfest. If I am not entirely mistaken, had they refused to do so, WoW would now be Mature / K18 / Adult only, etc. in EU countries.
Well in that case it’s down to Blizzards ignorance and incompetence for not doing their research, compounded by their pigheadednes in not adjusting the game to suit.
If you’re looking at marketing a product worldwide you need to do your market research or face issues. Blizzard obviously didn’t do a good enough job in that dept. in this case.
@Bawdawg: Actually, it is far more complex… You see, many of the EU regulations and requirements and French laws did NOT exist in 2005… That is why I mentioned retcons. I have played the now illegal version of Brewfest, when it was still allowed. So have tens of thousands others who have been about a long time. Blizzard did not fail, the world changed around them instead (over the years).
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Oh OK, All I’ll say is that plenty of other games manage to get along without these ‘legal issues’ so Blizzard must be (or regard themselves as) something ‘special’ in this case.
I’d be interested to know what exactly is it about Brewfest that the problem is. It can’t be the consumption of Alcohol and getting drunk as that’s a feature of one of LotRO’s events, so what is it ?
@Bawdawg: Actually, the alcohol / drunken behaviour thing plays into it… and as to other games, it makes a difference, where the servers and the operating company are. If you pay close attention to things you will notice that there are very few significant gaming companies that operate from the EU area. Effectively, EU created a double standard of sorts. You see, because US Blizzard operates under US laws, we are able to play the “old” Brewfest, IF we use an US account.
LoTRO was developed by an American company (Turbine, part of Warner Bros I believe), now being developed by Standing Stones Games (also American) The servers for the EU used to be located in Europe (now all of them in the US).
There’s is at least one event and several quests (available to US and EU players) where you consume alcohol, get drunk, pass out and even lose items of clothing ( you spend some time wandering about without any pants).
So legal issues ? not sure.
Hell LotRO even has smoking as a feature of the game. I would imagine the SJW’s having a fit if that was even suggested for WoW.
Only real difference is that LotRO is age rated 13, but 1 years difference isn’t really a big issue.
@Bawdawg: US company, US servers, US laws. A very typical example of the situation a mentioned. I wonder if they actually removed EU servers in order to avoid reprogramming…
They moved (not removed) the EU servers as part of a server downsizing exercise (ie there wasn’t enough players to justify the amount of servers they had at the time).
There are still servers that are stated as EU servers and I haven’t seen or read anywhere that there where legal issues with drinking (or smoking) involved.
But whatever, it is as it is.
I’d still like to see the 2 regions merged though.
@Bagdawg: Ok. But I think I have now derailed the main topic way too much already. 
@All: Speaking of the main topic, it will be interesting to see how things go tomorrow for Russia and on Thursday for US… 
There will undoubtably be a ‘Why are the servers down for so long’ thread.
I also predict several whine threads about it as well.
I’m looking forward to good news here too. Fingers crossed! 
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In connecting Chinese/Korean servers with other ones, there may be legal issues as those 2 regions do require government ID from the respective country to make an account there, if there weren’t such issues im sure blizzard would have unified Korean and Taiwanese servers a long time ago, especially since they share the same calendar for in game events.
The other 3 regions (US/EU/TW) don’t have this, the issues hindering those mergers are more likely economic (take TW for example where you can buy gametime by the minute and expansions aren’t even a thing (the CE extras are sold seperatly but you dont need to buy the BFA to level to 120). I dont think they want to export this monetization structure outside of Asia as im sure they make a decent amount off expansion sales, and me paying my 3.5€ for 30hours gametime every few months is surely less profitable than collecting monthly subs.
You can however even play on a region with a wow client of another region provided they are updated to the same patch (save for EU servers that restrict Korean/Taiwanese clients).
I think there are 2 problems they would have to overcome to merge regions:
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US and EU both share to a large degree the same realm names, for cross realm functionality to work without issue, the realms need to have different names. I think this might be why they when they made wow classic, no server name was used twice (except in china region)
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Pricing, subscription prices (wow token) etc are priced way differently between regions and as such the servers ended up with very different economies, even if you can buy the majority of services from whatever region some things remain restricted when your bnet is of another region from your wow account, namely tokens and 120 boosts (which puzzles me because you could buy 110 boosts without issue from outside of region).
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Sooo, there was an update in english on russian forums stating that the connection has been delayed, it won’t happen today and they don’t know yet when it’ll happen. So, so far, we have 1 out of 4 successful connections in eu, we’ll see tomorrow if americans get luckier.
@Esploratore: That is not good news. 
@All: New announcement…
Please Blizzard Ghostlands need more horde players
Yesterday said that when dealing with support you have to remember that “the people on the other sides are just human too”. But at some point this level of incompetence isnt just some human error anymore.
Three weeks ago they announced new connections. Which realms? No info.
Two weeks ago they announced the first connections. They failed partially. Guilds missing members, auction items disappearing, non-stackable items like mounts were duplicated, characters gone.
One week ago they announced nothing. Total silence EVERYWHERE about this topic. I only found a tiny post in a remote forum section about the guild issues being resolved. They werent.
Yesterday they announced long maintanance because of pre-shadowland stuff coming that we wont notice. Nothing about connections.
Today I asked under the announcement of the maintenance about the lack of news about connections. They replied with a link to an update but the link went to a complete seperate new thread (which they constantly reprimand players for) instead of the one being used for 19 days now.
Todays announcement is the connection of four realms.
- one low pop and a medium realm (makes sense)
- one of the LARGEST realms of the region and a low pop realm (makes absolutely no sense at all)
And we are just shaking our heads, every week. My best guesses make me depressed… this… whatever the heck they are doing.
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Tarren-mill was connected to Dentarg not because it needed Dentarg to have a healthy population, but to help dentarg, I imagine the same is true with Echsenkessel-blackhand. you also have to consider for the server mergers that for a server to merge it needs to be with a server thats in the same CRZ pool of realms, and of the same type. There aren’t many German servers at that data centre that house those 2 servers, so all things considered the backhand-echsenkessel merger actually makes a lot of sense. (im assuming that’s the one your referring to)
Edit: for reference the other German servers at that data centre are : Eredar, Antonidas, Frostwolf, Aegwynnm proudmoore, and alexstraza, (Also Die Aldor but that’s RP) given those options how would you connect the servers?