Tera blocking whole continents to fight hacking and farming

Certain corners of the globe are maligned in MMORPGs as havens for hackers, phishers, gold farmers and other unsavoury elements, and En Masse Entertainment not only agrees, it's taking action. The North American publisher of Tera plans to outright block great swathes of the world by IP, not letting them play with more reputable countries.

"Asia, Africa, Russia, and the Middle East are included on the block list," En Masse explains on a support page, spotted by a NeoGAF poster. "While we appreciate that there are players in these regions who would enjoy playing on En Masse servers, it's unfortunate that the vast majority of Internet traffic we see from these regions are from cyber-criminals relating to account theft, gold-farming and other hacking behavior."

You may be thinking to yourself, "Ah, but what about proxy servers?" En Masse concedes that players in those countries could use a proxy to join the NA servers, but notes, "Although we do not block them by default, a proxy or server host will be blocked if it becomes a popular tool for criminal behavior."

The list of regions allowed on the North America servers is North America, South America, Europe (excluding Russia), and Oceania. Everyone else will need to use servers from other regional providers, such as Frogster's European service.

Tera is slated to launch on May 1, assuming it's actually allowed to. Publisher NCsoft has filed a lawsuit to block Tera's release in North America, saying that it's based upon ideas Bluehole's founders "looted" from Lineage 3 whilst working on it at NCsoft.