Playing on EU realms while living in other region

Guides New/Returning Player Questions & Guides
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Hello everyone,

Not sure if this is the right forum category, so please guide me in the right direction if this post is more suitable somewhere else.

I will live in China for one year, but is not interested in creating a character in that region. Is there any way to play on EU realms while living there without using VPN?

Thanks!

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Yes, since I’m assuming what you have right now is an EU account. You don’t need anything else. Or well, this would be the case in most places, but China is a little bit tricky since they have their own version of the game because of cultural reasons. I’m not sure how it works there, but worst comes to worst, you might need to use a VPN. Generally though, you can use an EU account from any country, although your ping will go down and it will be more laggy due to the servers being further away.

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China has weird rules.

I am playing from India on EU releams and don’t need VPN. I am having 200-300+ ping.

Overall most Asian country have outdated internet technology (like 5 years behind EU countries).

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Yea its possible, i think the main headlines would be:

If you’ll be playing on your own computer/laptop you can just keep using the English client obviously. If you’ll be playing in internet cafes don’t expect the pre-loaded wow client to be of use to you.

The great firewall is the main thing that may (or may not) get in your way. If it does then you’ll indeed need to use a VPN (shouldn’t be a big issue really, to be fair i would get one anyway for non-wow reasons).

Make sure you have an Authenticator setup for your account ahead of time. Both for security reasons and to make it less likely that you’ll trigger a whole bunch of red flags at Blizzard when logging in from China (and have to go through a verification process to prove its really you and such).

Expect significant degradation in quality play time. There will likely be some non-insignificant latency of course, but more importantly than that, due to the time zone difference, don’t expect much overlapping playtime with guildies/friends and don’t be shocked if your realm seems near dead.

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Thanks for your comments!

I intend to use a VPN anyway, just worried that it will have a negative impact on the latency. Guess I will find out in one way or another!

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The VPN is unlikely to have a noticeable impact really, assuming its:

  • a VPN provider with servers in europe
  • The servers aren’t oversubscribed (too many concurrent users), most VPN providers let you choose from many different servers and often they show some sort of “current load %” metric or another.
  • a paid plan (not a free vpn provider or a trial/tryout plan, those tend to oversubscribe for obvious reasons)

If it meets those criteria, i suspect it often won’t add more than a couple milliseconds on top of the latency, and since you’ll likely be dealing with latencies of 200ms or more , it bumping to 205ms or even 210ms won’t matter.

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