US link for pre-order GR in NCshop

That was my old methode, but recently they seem to have changed something, that once i log in (into my 'masteraccount', wich i gues is flagged european), either the products completly dissapear from my 'basket', or the page instantly redirect to the main store of europe again.

And the topic of the brazilian guy.. Sometimes i serious wonder if they even care for people outside the 'main USA'.

I think when you log in, it now uses your IP to decide which version to show. Other people in a similar situation have complained about it as well.

The good news is you should be able to use the toggle in the upper-right corner to choose the US version after you log in, and then browse the correct store with that. If that doesn't work, then I for you.

Logged in or not, i can only select the 'european' languages, like german, french and GB english.

I'm very happy to see A.net is doing a great job on GW2, the way how they have their payment/account system is far superior to this crap we called US/EU NCsoft. Althought still few months to go, i have a new game to put my money in. I now have 7 unanswered tickets, 6 closed with no answer and only 3 properly answered (well, default reply but still).

But they only seem to care to advertise GR in US as much as possible, outside there.. they care little to none.

Normally that's the case, but for some reason it doesn't work now, going into the store via the US site still shows all the boosters for the EU for me.



Silly, stupid system. Why is there even different EU and US versions of boosters at all?

Gut reaction is: Legal

First, there is the acceptance of payment. Legally speaking NCSoft has to report all financial transactions. The expectation is that EU only buys from EU, US only buys from US, and so on and so forth. Now, we "know" that a significant number of non-US players buy and play on the US servers. Basically this just winds up meaning more paperwork on NCSoft's end to report transactions to the proper legal authorities.

There is also the submission of content for ratings. NCSoft submits the content to both the ESRB (in the US), and PEGI (for the EU).

The EU version, as I understand it, also includes translated content in French and German. As far as I'm aware, this translated content is not available in the "US-release" :: While the digital art, polygon, and geometry builds would be different, the additional languages would require additional code, making for a different final binary client.

Acceptance of payment is not relevant to the system of seperated US and EU stores in such way they have done now. As guildwars, NCsoft product also, is a full region-free game by now, they have no limitation on US or EU (never had actualy). Be it legal or not, it aint costumer friendly, by far it aint (next to the fact they admited they wont do any store-advertising in europe, nor we get the special goodies or GR-pre-order boxes).

A native American who is on holiday in Europe faces the exact same problem, he cannot acces the US store, wich basicly is a flaw in NCsoft's system and not some weird excuse of 'payment acceptance'. Likewise a WoW player is free to go to the US store as well as the EU store, dispite the clients/products have EU and US versions (although they also have region-free products, like authenticators and TCG lootcards), they can freely buy products in US and EU, the only limitation is your account itself.

Same goes for the 'client side language', the US and EU share the exact same client (really, it does), apart from a few IP adresses to wich the client connects. The majority of language is actualy server-sided, unlike many MMO's where the client have 'language' packs and can change language based on client's preferences rather then the server you are playing on, people going to zudunkft or villigance will have a 'forced' language change, rather then a client-preferenced setting. That was 1 of the reasons EU always had server-issues, they needed special attention when a patch was rolled out of new content was added.

They now only fixed this by giving links to the US versions of the products (as some visible, yet others arent), implying it is a 'free to buy from both US and EU store' system but the 'IP-based visibility' is the fail-factor in this system. Understandable they prefer EU-visitors to go EU-servers (thus showing EU products), but limiting the available products is imho a big fail, either make 2 seperate shops (like WoW) or show them all (lotro).

Next to Guildwars, it was also Tabula Rasa that even got 1 client, but gave a 'merged' EU and US serverlist, showing the method is possible to work with 1 unified client, that have only have limitation on the account-settings, rather then limiting accesability of products or servers. But perhaps both games werd built this way or heavy modified to work this way, and now the flaws of design on previous years on CoH, caught up to them.