Let's Talk: Language, Location and Limitations
Over the course of the last few months, a topic has grown within the Private Server community, particularly focused around non-English speaking players being present on labelled English realms, and we wanted to take this opportunity to get ahead of the rumour mill and elaborate on what we at Project Epoch see as potential issues and how we intend to tackle them.
Project Epoch has always, and will always, label itself as an English-speaking community, as we feel that the capacity to communicate, group with, and explore Azeroth with your fellow players is an important aspect of the World of Warcraft we all know and love. Within public channels, English is the enforced language of choice, with the exception of guild recruitment, but sadly, a simple ruleset can not alone suffice, and moderation can only go so far in this regard.
What can't we do?
Latency Restrictions
One of the many tools that a project has to try and restrict access to a server to within a specified region is via a dead simple latency-based check. To put it simply, log average latency for a player; if it repeatedly exceeds a threshold, then consider banning. However, we as a staff strongly feel that this shotgun approach will simply have too many legitimate players caught in the crossfire, not only from Oceanic regions, but also certain areas of North America, such as the western coast of the United States and Canada.
Geo-Locking
There are some in the community who seem to believe that it is entirely possible to ban just a singular country from accessing our services. If a project is claiming they can 100% prevent this, then they are outright lying to you. All that can be done is adding hurdles. With the existence of VPNs, proxies, and Tor, it is nigh on impossible to actually be 100% sure of the origin for a connection.
What are we doing?
Despite the above, there is a wealth of tools at our disposal, both in and outside of the game, that will allow us to push towards an exclusively English-speaking population. None of them, however, are free of risk, none are perfect, and most have some degree of possible circumvention. However, we firmly believe that with enough hurdles in place, each providing a barrier of frustration, we can drastically reduce the potential for non-English usage.
Email Blocking
Starting with Beta 3 registrations and persisting through to our launch environment we will be adjusting our registration process to prevent registration within specific domains. This includes but is not limited to:
- Netease: 126.com, 163.com, yeah.net
- Tencent: qq.com,vip.qq.com, foxmail.com
- Sina: sina.com, sina.com.cn, vip.sina.com.cn, sina.net
- Sohu: sohu.com, sohu.cn, sogou.com, chinaren.com, sohu.net
- Tom.com: tom.com, vip.tom.com, 163.net, tom.com.hk
- AliCloud: aliyun.com
- China Unicom: wo.com.cn, m165.com
- China Mobile: 139.com
- China Telecom: 189.cn
Of course this alone is not a huge hurdle for someone who wishes to register but it is an additional slow down to the process of joining Project Epoch from certain regions.
Mandated enUS Client
From Beta 3 onwards, we will be explicitly preventing the login of non-enUS client locales at the authentication server, simply being provided with the error message that they're utilizing an unsupported build. This, in isolation, is a very, very tiny hurdle due to the nature of Project Epoch only providing custom content with the enUS locale; however, it should further reduce the chance of a non-English client being modified for use on Project Epoch.
Stripped Localisation Data
The World of Warcraft client ships within it a large amount of localized content in the form of spell names, descriptions, user interface elements, and more. However, the overwhelming bulk of 'content' within World of Warcraft is held entirely server-side. This includes quests, NPC names, RP texts, item names, descriptions, gossip menus, book text, and much, much more. We have done a very simple pass of stripping all localized data, so that no matter what client locale you are using, only English will be sent from the server. This should mean that on a day-to-day basis, and with each new Project Epoch patch, the barrier for entry of requiring strong English-speaking skills will be ever-present.
In the above example, as you can see, many UI elements, which are kept within the Client itself, have remained using the zhCN localization. However, the real 'content' of the game, in the form of the NPC's name and quest texts, are provided exclusively in English.
Explicit Realm Zone
Up to now on Project Epoch, and on many other private servers, the standard realm zone is set to 'Development,' which allows essentially any language characters to be used in chat, player names, pet names, guild names, and more of a similar vein. Going forward, we will be explicitly limiting this to only extended Latin characters, which should allow the usage of English and most standard European language types to be utilized. However, this means that Cyrillic and Hanzi characters can simply not be used in any chat channels.
The Superintendent
And now we come to the final piece of the puzzle and time to introduce you to the latest member of the Project Epoch behind the scenes tools; The Superintendent.
What is the Superintendent?
To put it simply, the majority of connections from certain regions to private server services can only be accomplished with the usage of a VPN or Proxy service, which masks the origin of a connection, and you can only truly see the 'endpoint' of the VPN that is directly communicating with our server.
The purpose of the Superintendent is to periodically inspect the IPs of any account that has logged in to the game since the last time the Superintendent performed an inspection. This will be scheduled to execute twice daily. Through the usage of a 3rd party service, we will receive information about the most recent IP a player has used and whether or not it is suspected that they are using a VPN or Proxy.
This decision is not something that we have taken lightly as there are legitimate cases for someone to use a public VPN or Proxy service. The aim of Project Epoch is not to reduce internet freedom however based on recent events within the private server scene we feel that this is a step we have to take.
Is this perfect?
No! And it never will be. The act of detecting and preventing the usage of VPNs is, by definition, a cat and mouse game, simply due to the fact that it is in a VPN provider's best interests to ensure unfettered access to the internet. Even the largest people in the tech industry, such as Netflix, Amazon, and other media streaming companies, who are contractually obligated to try to prevent this usage, cannot succeed perfectly. However, by performing this analysis over time rather than at a singular point, we can more accurately isolate regular users of these services.
Account Actions
Each time that the Superintendent flags an account as suspected VPN or Proxy usage that account will receive an in-game mail notification to all of their characters warning them of their actions and allowing them to cease using such services.
If an account reaches 10 warnings within a one-month period, then they will receive a suspension of up to 30 days, heavily limiting their access to the Project Epoch realms. However, with this in mind, prior to launch, we will be creating a formal appeals process for anyone who strongly believes that they have been incorrectly targeted, so that we can grant them access to the game and use information provided to further tune the Superintendent.
During the course of Beta 3, the Superintendent will be running in the background, essentially in a read-only mode, so that we can do larger scale testing in a live environment and better gauge things like hardware requirements for the server on which the Superintendent lives.
Future Ramifications
To put it simply, a system such as this has the potential to grow in cost as our community and active player base grows in scale. With this in mind, we thought it best to be upfront about this and state that long-term, if this is the case, we may need to reduce either the frequency of Superintendent inspections or fragment the number of accounts checked each time to a random pool, by proxy reducing accuracy. Alternatively, post-launch, we may open donations to facilitate the usage of this feature.
Conclusion
Sadly, with the modern internet infrastructure as it stands today, we cannot, in good faith, say that we will be able to perfectly prevent usage from a specific region of the world nor would we want to this is simply aimed at ensuring the capacity to communicate with your fellow player. However, we hope that all of the above leads to enough hurdles to playing that we will be able to drastically reduce occurrences, and in the process, begin and continue to have a communicative and collaborative community on Project Epoch.
