That clause or variations of it has been there since the game went live back in Nov 2004. I signed up on 15 Dec 2004 and am still playing.

No sense worrying about things that you cant control or effect. Either they cut us off or they dont. According to their ToS they can legally just cut us off. The question is whether they will ever crack down and actually enforce it.

Businesswise, Blizzard is huge enough now that they afford to be a snobbish prick and lose a small fraction of their 7.5 M subscribers, but will they? Those legal clauses were inserted by lawyers to cater for the possibility should it ever be necessary to cut off those accounts if they were not in their best interests.

But anybody with even a shred of common sense would realize that they would be doing the gaming world outside those very limited countries a huge disservice by screwing the people who buy their games - real gamers who have been behaving themselves and loyally paying subscriptions for the last 2+ years. I cannot believe Blizzard would be so dumb as to want to make themselves hated by gamers.

If it ever happens it wont be just us that will be screwed - US servicemen serving in foreign countries could also have their accounts cut off according to this very strict ToS. I'm sure they will be thrilled to be taking bullets for their country and get screwed by a US company in return.

This post has been edited by limsk: Jan 10 2007, 08:07 PM

You are reading too much into this, methinks. Blizzard is an entertainment company not a political party.

Besides, who really takes what Malaysian politicians say seriously? We ourselves sure don't and we live here. Its common knowledge that most politicians are dumbasses who arent competent enough to work at a real job and have to "raise issues" to make it look like they actually do anything.

This post has been edited by limsk: Jan 11 2007, 11:09 AM

My personal take: Dont worry about it.

It's just a blanket clause in the ToS that you will find in a lot of legal documents to allow the company to take action without letting you sue them. Just a way of protecting their asses should it become necessary sometime in the future to close down accounts from other countries due to DOS attacks, mass hacking, rampant gold farming, whatever.

Those countries named are those that are supposed to play on US servers and which have traditionally strong government ties to the US. That clause is there because they feel that for other countries, they may not be able to take action via the local government channels so they have to put in a safety net to allow themselves to close accounts without legal reprisal.

If anything, it should serve to compel Malaysian players to conduct themselves decently online. Because in the event of a complaint against you, you can be kicked out immediately without much bother as stated in the ToS. Dont make yourselves a nuisance and all will be well.

If i were to reword the document to reflect what they are really saying, it would look like this (Uncle Lim's ToS for Dummies):

"A. Right now for US servers, we only distribute WOW to US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. Yeah we know any Ah Chong, Ramasamy or Ahmad can buy WOW from the internet. Since we have no distribution agreements with those ulu countries we don't really know how to control those buggers if a lot of subscribers turn out to be a nuisance and kacau our business. We dont really wanna kick people out but we reserve that right just to be safe and they cant sue us and our ass is covered legally."

For reference this is the original:
A. You may only access the Service from within the territorial boundaries of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Singapore. Any access to your Account, whether by you or anyone else, from any location outside those countries is a breach of this Agreement.


This post has been edited by limsk: Jan 11 2007, 11:40 AM