Conan Exiles' new region lock has prevented some regions from playing on official servers [Updated]

Update: Funcom contacted us this morning with a correction on our story:

"The region lock does not affect Russia and South America. It just means that players from Asia can't play on official North American or European servers, but official servers in Asia will be introduced this week. Players anywhere can still of course play on the thousands of private servers which are available."

Original story: If you're one of the people playing and/or shaking your character's genitals in Conan Exiles, then you may notice you can't log into your usual server anymore. That's because developer Funcom has decided to lock the official servers to specific regions. While the studio hopes this will put an end to a specific type of griefing, the region lock has prevented players in Asia, South America, and Russia from playing the game on official servers at all.

"We have decided to East/West region lock the official servers for three reasons," community manager Jens Erik said in a Steam forum post. "The language barrier and the different playstyles is proving jarring for a lot of players. Also, the vastly different time zones between regions made offline raiding an unavoidable issue for a lot of players who would wake up to all their stuff being completely ruined."

Erik also addressed the lack of servers in Asia, South America, and Russia, and said the developer will hopefully put servers up in those regions "sometime next week." Until that happens, players in those regions are stuck playing on private servers. A guide on Steam offers help setting up a dedicated Conan server.

Players who can currently log into the official servers have reported a number of crashes. Erik says that Funcom is aware of the issue and is working on a fix.

"We hope to have it patched as quickly as possible," he wrote. "Please keep in mind that we're only about two weeks out of Early Access launch. There will always be things that are in need of fixing, whether it be server performance, game balancing or minor and major bugs.

"There's not often a straight answer to all the problems that can come up when you're developing a game. Fix one thing and two more things might break."

We discussed Conan Exiles in a recent episode of The PC Gamer Show. You can find out what we think of the game and its genitals physics here.