Speaking as someone a little knowledgeable on the subject...
I am an ex-patriot South African who plays WoW and used to be a Game Master for Blizzard. Of course I can't prove this, so it's upto you whether or not you choose to believe me.
GMs were never given too much information, but a lot could be ascertained by the way support tools worked in that they highlight the division of the servers and regions.
I don't think there is enough of a market in SA for Blizzard to justify hosting servers there and I will demonstrate why I think this.
There are only four regions right now for WoW globally:
- Europe: Servers all hosted in Europe, even the Russians play on servers hosted in Europe and not Russia itself.
- Americas: Latin America, and Australia all play off servers hosted in the United States. Yes, you may not know this, but Australians have the same latency issues that South Africans do due to distance, although I suspect their ISPs are better.
- Korea: Pretty self contained.
- China: Self contained
China is a little different in how it's run, Blizzard itself does not operate WoW there, they have a local company do it. Probably mostly because China has so many censoring laws and is so culturally different to the rest of the world where Blizzard operates.
Otherwise, all the other regions are operated by Blizzard staff entirely, no support is outsourced, Blizzard employs the people with the skills to do everything. They are very proud of being arguably the best producer of computer games in the world, quality is everything to Blizzard, so they keep as much as they can in house. Including running all their own servers on hardware they themselves choose (and the developers program to it as well).
Blizzard uses pretty much the same standard set up for their server sites globally, each "group" of servers is about the same size.
You can see for yourself here:
http://www.wowwiki.com/US_realm_list_by_datacenter
Not at all coincidently, a single "site" is two battlegroups big. In all the time as a GM, it was always the same, all the sites were about the same size, in both Europe and the US. So, looking at the size of two battlegroups, a site is at least 30 realms big.
In my opinion, Blizzard would never put servers in South Africa unless it filled up at least one full site. And I think even one site in South Africa is unlikely because Australia, which definately has a bigger playerbase than the South African potential playerbase, has no site of their own.
So, how many players would be needed to be in SA to justify a site? A busy server is what makes official WoW so much better than private servers. So how busy is a busy server, well, based on use of the census+ addon, I counted it on a PvE realm way before I was at Blizzard and at the time, the realm had a queue, this was still WoW classic. It seemed to be about 3000 after adding both Alliance and Horde player who lists. With TBC they increased the limit, so it's more now, but I will not give the number due to confidentiallity reasons, it's probably worked out on the public web by someone somewhere though.
Alright, so maybe having the server hit at least 2000 everynight would be enough for a good social play experience. This is entirely guess work, but WoW is very casual focussed these days, so on average, people may only spend "maybe" 4 nights a week on WoW, considering some people play every night, and others only play 1 night. So, we need to have an active community of 2,000 + 2,000*3/7 to make sure the servers are busy enough each night, that's about ~2,850 active community members needed per server. So, 30*2,850 = 85,500.
I really guessed everything about the above, but I "think" it makes sense. Also, the math for wanting 1000 active players each night at least works out to about ~42,600.
Do you really think there are that many South Africans willing to pay monthly for WoW?
For those of you thinking "but what about the untapped potential of Africa?", I think you are fooling yourself, except for English, not many people in Africa speak a common language, and outside of South Africa, majority of people don't speak a whole lot of English. And if you are now asking "but Blizzard could translate", then consider that Blizzard is only now (possibly, as it's unconfirmed) looking at an Italian translation of WoW (see
http://www.wow.com/2009/05/18/are-blizzard-prepping-polish-and-italian-versions-of-wow/) and Italy has a lot more 1st world potential paying players than South Africa. This is important as translations are very expensive as everything, and for every patch, needs to be translated and done correctly and the you also need to offer Billing, Account and In Game support in that language too, everytime you have a new language team its a lot more expensive than making an existing team a little bigger.
I think AcidRaZor is pretty much right on the money here in that the ISPs here probably don't realize what undertaking it would be, each WoW site handles 10s of 1000s of players, they were probably thinking along the lines of it being like a group of FPS servers, which maybe host 100s of players collectively:
I'd have to disagree strongly with you tinman:
yes, I think they woke up one morning thinking that. Whatever research they have done before the point of asking Blizzard permission is not enough. I don't base my opinion on anything other than their previous track record. End of story.
If they can prove a well researched project that they won't half-ass and screw up then I'd be willing to listen, but mistake after mistake leads me o the same conclusion semaphore has. Blizzard won't accept the proposal because iGame don't know what they're getting themselves into.
a peering server would be nice though, so I'd chalk a victory up on that one if they get that far, at least then we'll be able to assess true numbers of SA people connecting to WoW and would have logs/proof of play to lobby for a local server....
And I agree that the best we can hope for is a nice peering server. Kind of an official proxy server which has good local bandwidh and excellent quality bandwidth to the WoW servers in the EU or the US. Blizzard would most likely put us with the Europeans as the time zone is pretty much the same.
If SA ISPs REALLY wanted to help local players, then they need to provide high quality bandwidth for WoW. Basically, use something like QoS in TCP/IP to make sure that WoW traffic has a higher priority that web or email traffic, that way ping times would be the best possible for South Africans. On premium bandwdth, like on leased line through Internet Solutions, you can get a ping of 200ms to London, so there is no reason why WoW can't be less than 300ms for South Africans.
Anwyay, sorry to get your hopes down, but I believe this is unfortunately the realistic truth.
