Steam, Itunes, WoW etc - US to NZL

Orestus

Hi all,

I just found out I'm going to be spending a couple of months in New Zealand for work. Does anyone have any insight into how the following games/services will function there if I am bringing them over on my laptop from the US:

Steam
Itunes
WoW
GoG

From some quick google searching I think I'm seeing that Steam and WoW will work fine, but I may have some issues with Itunes. Can anyone confirm or does anyone have any practical experience using these services with US accounts outside the US?

Adda

Orestus wrote: »

Hi all,

I just found out I'm going to be spending a couple of months in New Zealand for work. Does anyone have any insight into how the following games/services will function there if I am bringing them over on my laptop from the US:

Steam
Itunes
WoW
GoG

From some quick google searching I think I'm seeing that Steam and WoW will work fine, but I may have some issues with Itunes. Can anyone confirm or does anyone have any practical experience using these services with US accounts outside the US?

iTunes will work fine as well, it's not relative to your location so anyone can set up an account for any country and make purchases as long as they can fund it.

Essee

My fiancé and I have been playing European WoW and using a European Steam account here in Canada for a year and a half. The only problem with WoW (and Steam if we were actually using it to play with other people right now) is that you'll definitely have a higher ping to the servers used, which could be an issue. We personally have 200-300 ping, which is totally playable (though less so in a PVP situation), but I'm pretty sure New Zealand is a lot worse off from what I've read. There are various services to possibly lower your ping to things once you're over there, but I don't know much about them myself.

GoG should probably also be just fine. Most services just tend to show the version of the store/game from the country in which the account was created, regardless of your actual location, from my experience. Only stuff like Netflix (basically any service that streams TV/movies) tends to actually region-lock if it sees you're in the wrong place. Occasionally you'll run into a site that only wants to serve the page for your current region, which is a pain (usually you can tell the page to swap regions, anyway), but the aforementioned services should be just fine about that once you log in.

Raern

Ping time for MMOs isn't unplayable from NZ to US servers. A lot of people choose to play on US servers to be with long-time online friends rather than using the local servers anyway. A ping of 400-600ms isn't enough to stop you healing or tanking. It's probably a disadvantage in serious PVP like arena, but in general PVP other factors like gear and zerging have a much bigger effect.

Steam has regional pricing that vendors can choose to use, I don't know how it'd work if you were set up as a US acct originally, but if you run into pricing issues, buying steam games off other sites can get around crazy prices. For example Duke Nukem Forever was priced at US$80 on Steam for NZ buyers, either because they didn't want to undercut the local market, or because they're super-greedy. My friend found a legit direct download site (green man gaming) selling DNF for US$36.50 with no region lock, and it was as easy as that to get around.

Kalkino

WOW in NZ used to default to North America, with a couple of Oceania servers (that anyone could join) and the ping was usually ranged from 200-700 for me.

astronautcowboy3

You'll need to contact Valve/Steam support to enable credit card use overseas. Everything else will function just fine.