Two builds, not five servers
The mental model that makes this make sense is that there are not five servers you choose between — there are separate client builds, and each one can see a different set of servers. Your Steam store country decides which build you get at install time. That is why the problem shows up as a friend list failure rather than as a connection error: to a North American build, a player on the Global build is not on a distant server, they are effectively not there.
- North American build — reaches the United States server.
- Global build — reaches Germany, Singapore and Brazil, so a European and a Southeast Asian player can party with each other.
- Mainland China runs its own separate version again.
- Which countries land in which build is widely repeated but nobody has published it, so this page names server regions rather than a country list.
What it looks like when you hit it
The failure is quiet, which is why people spend an evening assuming they typed the name wrong. Across the launch-window reports the pattern is the same: you search for each other and the name does not come up, or it comes up and the invite will not send. There is no error explaining why, because from the game’s point of view nothing has gone wrong.
- Progress does not carry across. Starting again on the other side is starting again.
- There is no in-game region switch, so nothing in the settings will fix it.
- People in the thread speculated about VPNs, and nobody in it reported one working. Treat that as unresolved rather than as a workaround, and note that circumventing a region restriction is generally against a publisher’s terms.
The developer has answered this one
This is the unusual part, and the reason this page can be more definite than most on this site. The REGION LOCK thread did not go unanswered: a Bellring staff account replied the same day, apologised for the inconvenience, said they would try to find alternative solutions, and pointed players at their Discord for support tickets. That is not a fix and it is not a date — but it is the developer confirming the behaviour is real and that they consider it a problem, which is more than the community had for most launch complaints.
How this differs from the EU server question
These two get conflated constantly and they are different problems. The EU server question is about routing and latency — European players do reach European infrastructure, and the complaint is that the ping is unstable. This one is about reachability: a build cannot see servers outside its own group at all, no matter how good your connection is. If your friend list is the problem, you are on this page. If the ping is the problem, the other one is the one you want.