UK Players (Splitpaw & Runnyeye) on US Battlegrounds?

European EQ2 players wanting to experience Battlegrounds have had to deal with a series of compromises. Battlegrounds are divided not only by language (French, German, Russian) but region (UK vs. US). As a result, some servers have had such a small pool of players to choose from, that 24 x 24 Battlegrounds have been impossible, locking players out of acquiring some 40% of the gear and rewards available for Battlegrounds.

Rothgar has given us the first bit of concrete good news about solutions to these issues:

I just wanted to let you guys know that we’ve been making some changes on the backend that will allow UK players from Runnyeye and Splitpaw to play on the same Battlegrounds servers as the North American servers. Since there is no language issue to overcome, this only leaves the problem of hotfixes and servers that are out-of-sync.

What will happen after the NA servers are updated, you’ll no longer be able to connect to battlegrounds until the UK servers are on the same version. Typically your update window is later in the day so hopefully this won’t be too impactful. Ideally you’ll have a better play experience 90% of the time due to the larger BG server but there will be times that battlegrounds will be down for you.

I don’t have an ETA on this change yet, but we’re shooting for having it ready by GU56, so near the end of May.

Further, as to what happens when US and UK servers are no longer in synch, Avirodar had this suggestion:

Is it possible to keep the Euro BG servers active, but make it the default choice for Euro players to connect to American BG servers. But if the client verisons are out of synch/different, it will force Euro players to connct to the Euro BG servers instead?

At least, something of that general principal. There are a lot of ways it could be done, a lot of ways the choices can be presented and given to players. It would provide a solution where BGs are never actually “down” for Euro players, there is just small periods of time where getting into a BG map can take longer to join (due to being Euro only) as a result of different client versions.

To which Rothgar replied:

We have been considering that exact solution, but it’s not without problems either. This means we have to have dedicated machines and maintenance on a set of servers that are only used 10% of the time (or less)

But the biggest issue is that stat tracking would be separate depending on which BG world you are connected to. So your games on the UK world would not count towards the stats that occur on the NA world. This will become a bigger issue when the seasons start and stats are used to calculate leaderboards and rewards.