Will Spellborn publisher block you?

I was reading in the Spellborn forums, including the discussions on the potential blocking of players. While Mirage the PR Manager had said before that no IP blocking would be done by Frogster and Mindscape I read the following from community manager Banshee:

No, you cannot import game and play on European servers. 

If you live in the countries covered by Frogster/Mindscape/French publisher, you can play only on EU servers. If you are not living in those countries, you cannot play on these servers. 

If you live in territories covered by Acclaim, you can play only on Acclaim servers. If you are not living in those countries, you cannot play on these servers. 

If you do not live in either of those countries, you will have to wait till we come up with some solution, but you won’t be able to play neither on EU, neither on Acclaim servers – at least not on 27th of November.

Generally at the moment IP is checked when creating an account (with automatic redirection if IP is not valid). I cannot tell you at the moment how exactly that will work with in-game IP blocks, but likely they will be some measures in place as well.

I can accept that they might want to limit the countries involved in the open beta, since they will probably not use all the server capacity that they will have for release and maybe want to have some better control from where people connect due to that. But this sounds like there is some restriction going to be enforced going live after all.

I can only think of that this is because Spellborn actuallty has four different publishers covering European countries (Frogster, Mindscape, Acclaim and some new French publisher) which is dividing up the map of Europe and elsewhere between themselves, regardless of the concerns of the natives. Maybe their contracts with Spellborn were set up only specific countries were specified and they now have to figure out how to divide the money from any players that are not coming from these countries. And until they have figured that part they will pehaps block players from other countries.

This is quite unfortunate and bad that is an issue raised at such a late stage. I still hope that any blocking now is only temporary and until it is sorted out with the publishers how they will split the money. After that, let anyone play wherever they want.

Anything else may just hurt the game in the end and it is not what Spellborn need.