I’m thankful that I didn’t have to experience any of the issues that the intentional player base is experience trying to obtain keys for Sentinel’s Fate, due to me winning a copy of the game from the trivia Stargrace held on Twitter yesterday. Hugs to you Stargrace, I’m eternally grateful.

In the history of EQ2 expansion launches, this one has to be the worst. The sites that SOE partnered with either didn’t accept orders from specific countries, or ran out of keys in the case of DLGamer (who also refused to accept Singapore purchases, btw). Worse still, DLGamer heavily oversold and accepted the money of players even though they did not have the products to back it up.  When Kiara visited the #EQ2 IRC channel on ZAM during the hours leading up to launch, she was faced with an anger mob of international gamers, who were out to lynch.

Despite me sharing many similar sentiments as the players who were not able to obtain the game, I felt that Kiara was being treated unfairly. Without her, it is possible that no international customer would have even been able to play on launch day itself. Rather, the responsibility for the whole fiasco lies with the invisible people in upper echelon of SOE’s management, the cold businessmen in suits. At the end of the day, the international community still constitutes a sizable force in the playerbase and there’s no reason to treat them as second-rate customers just because they do not live in North America.