Starcraft 2 will be Region-Locked

It appears that SC2 is going to be region blocked. Making it so that only "Europeans" will play "Europeans". The only way to bypass this would be to buy a separate instance of the game for each region you wanted to play, if you lived in Europe.

There will be no playing with your American or South-Korean buddies in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. At least, not if you're European.

Blizzard Entertainment's VP of product development, Frank Pearce, has confirmed that the game will not allow people to play across regions.
"It'll be structured very similarly to World of Warcraft, where you've got the European region and players matched against the other players within their region,"

"if you're a European player and you've got friends that are in another region that you want to be able to connect with, we definitely want to support that," although "it might mean that you have to access it through the US client."
So if you want to play against people in different regions, be prepared to buy multiple versions (one for each region you want to play in) and multiple battle.net accounts.

Hey! It's another way to make more money!

In this relatively short bu really interesting interview with GXBlog, the Blizzard’s Global Manager for Community Development, Mark Yu has revealed that the Starcraft II will be region-locked. This means that once the game is released, you are stuck with opponents from around South East Asia/Oceania region for the time being unless you willing to buy multiple versions of the game as explained here:

Will the best case scenario be that I buy both the US and Asian versions, just to be able to play on both servers?

Mark Yu: Yes, when it releases on day one, if you want to connect with your friends in the US, get the US box or if you want to play with Koreans, then get the Korean box. However if you want to get the best experience out of your game here in South East Asia, you should get the local boxset. The latency, the community, those are the things are going to really define the experience, and you don’t want to miss out on that.

While we totally understand the reasoning but we can’t help to feel sorry for gamers that want to play with their gosu friends in Korea. Oh well…

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