Briannon wrote:As Adalyn said, you would have to start again on the europe servers because characters aren't transferable across servers, not least because they are playing in different versions - the US servers are always several patches ahead of what we have here.
However, one reason I would recommend a US account is the length of time it takes to get new content here. We're debating March/April as the possible release time for cata, which has now been on release in the States since December. A US account gives you the chance to play the game as Mythic intend it without having the long wait for the Euro version. I certainly enjoy the catacombs version a lot more than the current 1.71 version and to this day I cannot understand why there has to be so much delay. Why can't we have parallel development here in Europe?
I know WoW may not be everyone's favourite cup of team atm but Blizzard managed to get it released in Europe only 2 months after the US release, so why not DAoC?
I don't know the answer and would be interested in hearing from someone who does.
The reason there is a delay is because we licence the game from Mythic rather than being an offshoot of Mythic. Blizzard run WoW US and WoW europe themselves and all development is done inhouse in parallel. Both Euro and US players are their customers and so they have a vested interest in keeping both sets of players happy.
Mythic's customers are all in the US. Mythic do not answer to Euro players at all regarding quality of service. It makes no commercial sense for them to make their paying customers in the US wait for Europe to localise patches and content. Having said that however, Mythic have acknowledged that the process by which we localise content is too unwieldy and can be streamlined. There have been some initiatives put in place to reduce the delay between live release on US servers and live release here.
For the record, as some of you may not know how the patching process goes, here's a potted breakdown of how it works.
1: Mythic develop the patch, test it internally, put it on Pendragon for player feedback and testing.
2: When the bugs are ironed out and it's as finished as it can reasonably be, it's put live on US servers.
3: Mythic watch it for a couple of weeks to make sure it's stable and to fix the bugs that will inevitably be found when your test crew grows from a few dozen to tens of thousands.
4: Mythic fix whatever needed to be urgently fixed as a result of the patch.
5: When it's stable and the post release bugs have been ironed out we get sent the patch (with fixes) for translation and testing.
6: We translate the language parts (which doesn't actually take as long as some people would have you believe), some patches have a lot of translation (expansions for example), others have barely any. We also translate the server code to fit our server setup. Also the EU codebase is slightly different to the US codebase due to various licence issues.
7: We test the patch in English. If we find any bugs we send them back to Mythic.
8: Mythic find a fix for the bugs and send us new versons of the patch.
9: We test the new patch, send any new bugs back to Mythic.
10: repeat steps 7, 8 and 9 until the patch works properly.
11: Test translations in French, German, Spanish and Italian to make sure that everything that should be translated is translated and that there are no broken dialogues, keywords or other problems that could occur from changing languages. Problems at this stage are fixed inhouse.
12: We put the patch live on our servers.
The delay at present comes from steps 7-9 where we need to send things back and forth between Mythic and ourselves. The speed at which we get fixes back very much depends on how busy Mythic devs are. With NF we were testing as they were doing final tests on Catacombs. It's not hard to guess which project would be higher priority. While it's unlikely we'll ever be on the same patch as the US, Mythic have told us they want to speed up the process and have faster response to our problems.
