At the beginning of the week, Bioware (Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins) announced an initiative called the Bioware Bazaar, a mock online auction in which members of the Bioware community are able to earn tokens for completing certain tasks, and then spend those tokens on special prizes and rare, sponsored collectible items.

The problem is that this event is currently only available to citizens of the United States due to a last-minute legal snag, effectively locking out Bioware’s truly global community of fans from participating.

Fear not, though, as in a very special forum post, Bioware’s co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk addressed the situation, first by apologising to the developer’s fans, and then by announcing that, pretty soon, international members of the community will get their own version of the Bioware Bizaar. From the post:

“Hi everyone –

The BioWare Bazaar was launched this week as the start of a year-long celebration around BioWare’s 15th anniversary.

We recognize that BioWare has a global community, and the Bazaar this week was originally intended to be an international event to reflect our truly global fanbase. Unfortunately, we encountered some last-minute legal complications around how contests can be structured in different parts of the world that prevented us from including all territories in this first event, even though that was our original goal. And for that, we sincerely apologize – our goal with this sort of celebration is to show all our fans worldwide how much we appreciate your support!

BioWare definitely really values all members of our world-wide Community, no matter where you live. Accordingly, in the coming weeks, we will be announcing details about future events specifically for fans living in those territories which were excluded from participating in the first BioWare Bazaar. The future events will be a bit different from the first Bazaar in how they’re set up and structured, but our goal is to feature the same caliber of awesome prizes and great BioWare collectibles. We’ll announce more details in the coming weeks :)

The reception from those fans who have been able to take part in this first event has been incredible – thank you for participating! - and we’re looking forward to future events where we can enable fans from additional territories to also join in the fun.

Thank you all for your continued and ongoing support and participation in the BioWare Community – we really appreciate all your support over the past 15 years, and the future will be even brighter!”

Sincerely,

Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk Co-founders, BioWare”

Source: Bioware Forums