I strongly agree with the OP, it’s madness that a game as large and populated as this is region locked. Even if characters cannot be transferred across regions, it’s probably even worse that warbound-wide progress, achievements, transmogs, mounts, store purchases etc can’t be either.
To address the comment above, while it is possible to play at a high level even with high ping, no one would call it enjoyable. Similarly if you were to measure the same player playing in a high or low ping environment, they would always play better in a low ping one.
Imo you really shouldn’t be forced, especially when paying a monthly sub, to choose between playing with high ping at weird off-peak hours (for your current timezone) or losing every single thing on your account you’ve potentially been collecting, unlocking and achieving over the course of 10,000s of game-time.
If you want a concrete example of this; the Mage Tower artifact weapon appearances that Blizz recently announced wouldn’t be in legion remix because they want them to be prestigious and restricted. I have almost every single mage tower artifact appearance on my EU account, but on my NA account that I’ve chosen to move over to due to a season full of disconnects, unplayable lag and framedrops and personal IRL reasons, I can’t use any of them.
Nor can I use any of the mounts I’ve obtained, transmog I’ve farmed, toys I’ve collected, seasonal titles I’ve earned and much much more.
It seems very hypocritical to take a stance where you want a players achievements and collectables to have meaning and prestige, and then not allow those things to stay with the player when they make personal IRL moves.
I’d probably dare to say that even if you were to offer one off syncs (rather than real-time syncing) between regions of these things (no character transfer) as a paid service, most players who are affected with this would jump at the chance to use this.
FWIW
The region restriction is because of different laws in each region.
This is the biggest cop out answer ever. There are very very few locales in the world that have genuinely restrictive data laws that wouldn’t allow this type of move (China and possibly Korea being 2 of the few that do exist).
For most regions data-laws, even the strict ones, almost anything can be done with explicit permission from the owner of the data. What’s more is most of this data wouldn’t be classified as restricted as it’s simply not personably identifiable information. Your financial data can be shared between EU and US banks with your explicit permission and that is magnitudes more sensitive than whether you managed to obtain Thunderfury.
At the very least if they’re really going to use this as an excuse to not offer this type of functionality (when multiple games across a large variety genres do) they should really explicitly call out the specific restrictions that are not allowing them to do this rather than give a cop out 1 line answer.