Big splash in the Shadowbane pond… all three of them.

Well the preverbial unspeakable hit the fan in the later part of the week in the Shadowbane community.

Here’s how the story started. SWING! announced on their Shadowbane mirror site that the European players would only be permitted to play on the Euro servers of Shadowbane. This subject has been something left up in the air until this point, as not much has really been said on it.

But this statement did create a couple bombshells.

Vosx, who works for UbiSoft the North American publisher of the game released a couple statements and made some posts. He basically said that SWING!’s stance is identical to that of UbiSoft and En-Tranz, the “other two” publishers. Here they are some of his comments :

We understand this is going to be a problem for some of our players. Unfortunately, all of the publishers are bound by these contract restrictions. We apologize that this announcement was mistimed since SWING! is not alone with these agreements, and all of the Publishers should have released this FAQ at the same time. So don’t blame Swing, we are all operating under the same agreements here.

Ubi Soft, SWING!, and En-Tranz have all been having meetings together on this very issue. We are working together on this, and we all recognize this as a problem. If we can find a way to make an international system work in the future, everyone is willing to try.

and also said

Trust me – we have heard your outrage! It would suit us better if any player could buy any version they wanted – and play where ever they wanted. This arrangement does not benefit us at all. I don’t care if Martians play on our servers, as long as they don’t exploit. We have no interest in breaking up families of guilds.

We are going to discuss this issue more next week, and see if something can be done. That’s all I can promise you though. I will let you know how it turns out.

Warden, who works for Wolfpack the developer, chimed in with a statement saying in short that Wolfpack has always wanted one single world, for those of you who have followed it will be able to atest to this.

Players are up in arms about the issue, saying that this decision is the worst thing that could be done to a MMORPG, and others swearing off the game entirely now and taking whole guilds with them. There’s even a petition to demand that the publishers reconsider and form one gameworld that all players can use.

Now everyone just take a nice deep breath and go read a book =)