Comment South African WoW player (Score 3, Informative) 125
Blizzard did in fact try to take some measures a couple of years ago regarding South Africa and our fleet of Private Servers.
Because of the high volume of "private servers" in SA (hosting all of Blizzards games [starcraft, d1,d2,War3, and WoW]) Blizzard threatened not to ship WoW - The Burning Crusade to South Africa.
This fell through as the game was oddly enough available in Zimbabwe, and so suppliers were just importing the game.
This being said, one of the main reasons PS exist in SA is because our pings to Blizzard servers(and everywhere else in the world) usually vary between 600-1200ms. It can be lowered to 350, but this requires a purchase of an unshaped account (which sells for over R125 per gig).
So instead, SA gamers choose to rather enjoy a lag free game, rather than a full feature game.
And with local bandwidth costing almost 10% of our "blended" bandwidth some players are almost forced into using PS.
I'm not saying that this is a valid excuse to host PS, but sometimes when you are forced into a corner, you just have to make do with what you have.