MMO operators are faced with a constant battle with hackers, gold farmers, and other exploiters, working tirelessly to identify and ban them before they can ruin the experience for honest players. But En Masse, the North American publisher of upcoming MMO TERA has announced a much simpler plan for stopping ne'er-do-wells from getting into its North American servers—simply block large swathes of the world from playing on its servers.

In an announcement this weekend on the En Masse support database, En Masse said it will block IP addresses from Asia, Africa, Russia and the Middle East from connecting to its North American TERA servers, contradicting a number of earlier statements that it would not put such IP blocks in place.

While En Masse acknowledges that there are likely some legitimate players among the more than 5.3 billion people in those IP blocked regions (nearly 80 percent of the world's population), the company says, "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." And while those foreigners could conceivably get around these blocks by using proxy servers, En Masse promises to block a proxy "if it becomes a popular tool for criminal behavior."

Players in non-Russian Europe, Oceania, and South America will be able to log into the game's North American servers, or European servers operated by Frogster. En Masse encouraged those in other regions to "participate on servers specifically designated for their area" in order to "keep the quality of service high for players within North America." Left unsaid is how the game experience in those regions will be impacted by what is apparently an audience comprised almost entirely of hackers, thieves, and cheats.

While other MMOs have instituted similar blanket IP blocks on regions in the past, such moves are usually made to satisfy international publishing deals and licensing restrictions, not because the publisher sees foreign players as untrustworthy per se. And while En Masse did cite unspecified licensing issues in a follow-up statement given to Massively, it doubled down on the security-through-continent-sized-walls explanation as well.

"Although these restrictions are not a panacea for preventing hacking, they are highly effective, and produce more positive results than might be expected," the company said, noting that it is already under "continuous, sustained assault as hackers anticipate the launch of TERA," planned for May 1.

While we can appreciate these concerns, it seems a little unfair to lump honest players in with the criminals they happen to live near. The company did say it "hope[s] to extend the regions in which TERA is accessible in the future," so hopefully a more targeted, less absolutist approach to international server security will be implemented soon.