moving away

[JAM86]

I will be moving to china due to a job offer that I got and now I find myself asking around to see if this game can be played there?
My step-father who goes there for business too from time to time tells me you can't even access Facebook and it seems china has a lot of restrictions about what you can do online.
If anyone has an answer I would be most thankful.

[Sove92]

No matter how much I google, the answer is that the game cannot be played in China, you're going to need a VPN for that (best to get that before moving), it would be wise anyway to get around the GFW.

[Karnyboy]

Eventually you will be able to play in China, that is a market SE plans on hitting, but expect an entirely different feel from the game. No skeletons, no gambling I think too, they need stupid "take a break" message every hour, it's odd.

[Kaze3434]

isnt china getting an entirely different launcher/download? would you be blocked if you brought a comp or ps3/4 that already has the game?

[Nero]

SE is going to release a Chinese Version, so at one point you will be able to. But as far as i know, the Chinese Server will be seperated from the other Data-Centers.

[Kimikryo]

I need to ask this.
If you take your PC/Laptop with you. The game is already installed right?

While you might be unable to connect atm (vpn helps for this, if this is allowed in china that is), you should still see your game because you still have your original files right, you still have the same account.

[Gardes]

It's not going to be just the standard latency issue due to distance you'll be having, OP. There's the great firewall of china. All outgoing and incoming connections passing through china will be rerouted through the government's mega servers to be filtered and censored (I think it's either guangzhou or shanghai). I've had a huge issue since the beginning of launch with china telecom (the biggest isp around and they're all owned by the government), making me play with 400+ latency and massive packet loses. It's just unbearable. I've even trace routed and tried looking at where the jam is and sometimes I get routed to somewhere near tibet or something where the latency spiked hard before going back east out of china. Imagine you're trying to connect to england from new york but you're being routed to seattle first before going to new jersey and then to england. It's that baffling. I've heard that china unicom users have less problems but I've also heard that the censorship is even worse on those isps (youtube, facebook, twitter, and sometimes even google is blocked in china and many more!). You're gonna need a VPN regardless of the isp you use.

HOWEVER, if you decide to use services like wtfast, pingzapper, battleping to help you play arr, I would advise against it. They do what they're advertising but as far as I'm aware they're not designed to bypass china's brand of censorship. They might claim that they have been able to, but by my own experience with pingzapper, it is not good enough. What you need is a local vpn that is targeted for the local mainland users. I didn't know of this and titan hm and ex was a truly insufferable experience until by chance, I looked around in these very forums and found someone recommending the very same thing I'm recommending right now. I tried it (Lonlife but the website is all chinese) and it is so much better than pingzapper (battleping's trial is too short to get any real test on titan done, wtfast website is somehow blocked in china so you need to get a vpn to even access the full site lol). Constant 270-280 from guangzhou and stable enough to deal with aoe dodging consistently once you get used to that amount of latency. When I used pingzapper, it would bounce between 280 and 330 and sometimes even more like it's not sure if it can get through china's firewall or not so not very reliable for something like titan at all.

For the actual account part, I do not recommend playing on the chinese servers either. If the sub system is the same as wow china, it'll be way easier for RMT to get into and you have to keep in mind that they're in on their own turf. They can communicate easily with the players, they even advertise their QQ (chinese IM service) and phone numbers and stuff to make quick trades. When I tried playing it with a friend, the RMT situation is just as bad as FFXIV's RMT peak and I was playing way after chinese cata came out. On the game itself, I don't know about your chinese capability but I know enough to be able to read and speak for daily use but all the words they use in the game ended up being moonrunes nonsense to me. Even the player interaction flew over my head all the time.

If you stick with your american (edit: should be western, not just american lol) account though, you still have to find out if you can still pay with your current payment setup. I dont know if SE does an IP check but they DO check on your credit card origin and account origin. I can't use my credit card because of this. There's the ultimate game card to crysta option but they're closing it soon and SE isn't responding to the thread asking for words from SE. So there's only game time cards left. You can probably get it online but it's not the best way to pay for sub imo. So, yes, checking out your options before it's too late is prudent imo.

[mbncd]

I think the Chinese version is going to be free to play with a cash shop so you might not have to actually buy time but it'll probably be B2W over there. It's possible I'm misremembering, it might have been optional subscription for more content and a cash shop, but I do think it was going to be free.

[Zakalwe]

Gardes, kudos for what I'm sure is an incredibly useful post. Do you think it would help the OP further if he transferred to a Japanese server with a large English-speaking Oceania/SE Asia population?

[Gardes]

Distance wise, it would definitely help but that's not a guaranteed thing though. Back in 1.0, all the servers are in japan and I was playing without a vpn yet and the problem was still largely the same. I trace routed and was able to identify that once my connection hits japan, the first node there starts dropping my packets. It could be the node in japan I'm connecting to simply doesnt like receiving things from china but why, I do not know (maybe I'm just reading too much into it). As for the service I'm using itself, they have multiple subscription setups based on the games the service supports and the regions the games are in. There's american game servers only and there's international. I talked to the chat support and was told to go with international, which kinda makes sense since the FFXI servers are in canada and japan. I haven't tried playing in any japanese data centers in ARR though.

For people who would recommend the OP play in the chinese servers, bear in mind that the chinese game would likely be a separate entity, completely detached from the international version, much like wow china. Updates would be separate, forums would be separate, accounts would be separate. Which would bring me to the next point. OP likely already has an established character in the 'international' waters and have made friends to play with. Leaving them for a completely different population in an entirely different language and customs would probably be too much because he'd be abandoning everything. Then there's the question of the permanence of OP's move to china. If he's only there for a few years, it makes zero sense to tie himself to a chinese server because he won't be able to transfer it over to an international account.