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I'm from Europe, but I heard that in the North America region they have more maps, players and others features. Is that true?

Should I choose North America over Europe (even with the server distance issue)?

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  • When you purchase SC2, you get it for both EU and NA don't you? Could be wrong here. I have an SEA account and I have both SEA and NA when I purchased it.
    – deutschZuid
    May 9, 2012 at 0:18
  • well, I don't know exactly. When I go to download the game client I see 6 regions there and some languages. By default EU/DE is selected, but I was wondering if I should choose North American and then download the game client... or it doesn't make any difference?
    – Katie
    May 9, 2012 at 0:21
  • You won't have to worry about this for too much longer. One of the features of the upcoming expansion, Heart of the Swarm, is Global Play. us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/5366967/…
    – Ampersand
    May 9, 2012 at 5:27
  • @Katie - At this time the two regions are seperate. If you wanted to access the NA region and EU Region today you would need two copies of the game. As already pointed out the first expansion will introduce Global Play, which will allow you to have a profile on any region you want. I would stick with what is true today, the latency you will face as a player in the EU will be great, against NA players.
    – Ramhound
    May 9, 2012 at 18:36
  • @Katie If you have friends with whom you would like to play, then choose the same region as theirs (presumably Europe). Otherwise you will have no possibility to play with them at all. (My brother has US, me - Europe and we cannot play which each other.)
    – Piotr Migdal
    May 12, 2012 at 22:13

2 Answers 2

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There doesn't seem to be any significant difference between number of players/skill levels at the lower tiers.

Maps cannot be uploaded to the EU server by, let's say, an NA mapmaker without an EU account, but they can be shared across the Internet via other means, and be uploaded by people from other regions once they get their hand on them. Some mapmakers do, however, have multiple SC2 accounts in different regions, which facilitate the spreading of the maps they make across all these regions. So based on that, there is a very good chance that the difference in map availability is minimal across regions.

Also, with the exception of SEA (Southeast Asia + AusNZ) accounts, each copy of Starcraft is restricted to the region it's purchased in. See here for confirmation. UPDATE: That being said, however, Blizzard is looking to introduce Global Play in a future update, which will allow players to create characters and play with their friends from different regions (thanks RamHound!)

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  • Care to explain the downvote? Mr Anonymous?
    – deutschZuid
    May 10, 2012 at 6:34
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Since you're from EU, you'll have better latency to the EU players. Unless you specifically wanted to play with friends from NA, it would be wise to play on EU. You're unlikely to ever have serious trouble finding a game on either server. Most of the popular maps have distributors on each server.

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  • Should read "better latency to the EU players." SC2 is peer-to-peer, meaning you communicate directly with the other players; there is no intermediary server acting as arbiter. You only communicate with Blizzard's servers to find match-ups and provide authentication.
    – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft
    May 9, 2012 at 14:44
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    @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft Have a Blizzard source for that?
    – Decency
    May 9, 2012 at 16:35
  • No, I can't find any, but it is well-known within the programming community. Writing an RTS to use the client-server model would be foolish, and Blizzard is anything but foolish - almost all RTS's use peer-to-peer (see my above link). I did find this, which explicitly states that Warcraft III (and, implicitly, SC1) use peer-to-peer; and this, an analysis of SC1's networking model which states it is peer-to-peer. I am absolutely 100% certain SC2 is peer-to-peer as well.
    – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft
    May 9, 2012 at 17:01
  • I disagree. Have you ever played some micro maps online? Even if you are alone you have a huge delay.
    – ayckoster
    May 10, 2012 at 10:24
  • @ayckoster That's probably related to the forced delay in the game: gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/65049/…
    – Decency
    May 10, 2012 at 13:54

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