Earlier in the month, we pointed out how eager western fans of Blue Protocol were ready to arrive to the Japanese version of the game with a fan-built translation tool, a community Discord for coordination, and plans for an unofficial English server choice in tow. Unfortunately, it looks like Bandai-Namco is spoiling the party, as it has reportedly kicked out players who are accessing the game outside of Japan.
Many of these reports are showing up on the fan-built subreddit, with multiple threads talking about western players being punted off of the Japanese version. The banhammer has also reportedly affected Japanese players on accident as well, while there are arguments in favor of and against the move, along with players reporting – or in some cases presuming – that most Japanese fans support the bans.
Meanwhile, Bandai-Namco has been continuing to wrestle with some issues, most notably a bug that stops players from leaving a mission. The studio doesn’t have a permanent fix in place for the problem at the time of this writing, but it has announced a provisional measure that will check a character’s status every 10 minutes and manually move characters out of completed missions until the root cause of the problem is found.
In other BP news, Smilegate has officially confirmed that the South Korean version of the MMO is set to release sometime this year. A specific timetable isn’t given, but the studio promises to “fully deliver the charm and fun of Blue Protocol through high-quality localization work.”
