Quick one. I haven’t really watched a lot of the EQN reveal videos. I typically don’t do that kind of stuff, because I tend to react negatively to the staged and artificial hype-building that goes with those events. I wouldn’t mind trying out EQN once the beta comes around, though.
Turns out you can’t sign up for the beta as a European, though. Well, not with SOE at least. If you want to do the beta, you have to sign up via Pro-Sieben/Sat-1, which understandably a lot of people don’t want to. (On the other hand, that company hasn’t lost all your user accounts to security leaks yet! Might only be a question of time, though.)
The question is, of course, if that means that SOE will want to do one of the most despicable things in online games: split people by region. Really, I feel extremely strongly about that point. It should never, ever, be done, under no circumstances whatsoever. I’ve been bitten by these stupid restrictions too often.
However, at least for th beta, there’s a workaround. When you try to sign up via everquestnext.com, you first have to provide your credentials, and then are sent in an infinite loop back to the main page as a European. However, if you directly access the page behind that check, you can sign up without any problems. I did that by using a link that a helpful player in EQ2’s general chat posted: Everquest Next Beta Signup. I was cautious and scouted the link, because you never know whether it’s a scam. Since it’s a station.sony.com domain though, I don’t see anything suspicious about the link.
I can’t promise you you’ll ever get a beta invite – who knows, they might check for residence before they send them out. If I had to guess though, they won’t be that rigorous in their checks – if they don’t even just do it lottery-style anyway.
I signed up with my SOE account, got a registration confirmation, and now will just wait and see.
The link works but it just takes me to the general log-in page. Once I log in to my existing account and apply for the beta it diverts me to the EU signup site again. I also tried making a brand new account at the link and leaving my location as the default United States but it checks the IP address and redirects me again. If I’m missing something, please let me know – it wiuld be nice to test using my main SOE account not one made specially.
As far as I understand it there won’t be region locking for the actual game although I imagine the betas will be separate – they usually are. I believe we should be able to play on US servers but will have to use a PSS1 account. I don’t have a problem with that, other than that it will be slightly annoying to have yet another account to play EQNext when I have half a dozen perfectly good SOE accounts already.
Very weird. Now that you said it, I tried again – it only worked in firefox, not in Chrome (even though I used Chrome on my other machine to sign up, so it worked there back then!)
Can you try the following link?
clicky!
It’s the link of the page behind the login. If you’re not logged in, it should redirect you to the login page. If you are, it should go through directly.
That one gives me
“We have encountered a system error while processing your request.
Please try again later.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
If you continue to encounter this error, please contact Customer Service at http://support.station.sony.com”
I wonder if they are blocking these loopholes right now?
Hmmm. Maybe. I’d go with the simplest answer though and guess it might just be a temporary overload or something similar.
I’d try again tomorrow.
Will do! I’ll let you know if I have any success.
Cool, thanks! I’ll be interested to hear how it went.