It seems that way, doesn't it? It drives me crazy when web services work that way. I travel A LOT, so I am pretty dependent on GOG for my gaming because there is no weird region locking going on here.

While this statement is true, it's meaningless without saying why the publishers want it. In this case, they offer significantly lower than normal prices so people in low income countries will be willing to buy a game instead of pirating it. It's possible to remove regional pricing and make games a lot harder to buy in those countries, but the question is if it's desirable.

I think in the end the solution depends on how many buy in these countries and how many cheat using VPN. If the percentage of cheaters is small, they can be ignored. If the percentage is large, then removing regional prices may be financially a good solution for publishers.

You can now, after a recent change. You get a regional store depending on the payment method on file.

Also you could by using a browser and the ?cc= trick to change your store location. :p

Certain IP addresses are used by VPN providers. Instead of banning users like Steam does, GOG could block these IPs (like Hulu does, see below) - you could still try to purchase the game with a different price (usually lower), but this would result in an "VPN detected, payment rejected" error message.

Hulu imposed VPN blocking in April 2014 - it's impossible to watch videos outside the US (at least not with well-known VPN providers, tested with TunnelBear). You'll see the following error message (see attachment).

Unfortunately, there is no way to stop customers from travelling physically without imposing restrictions on the site, such as:
- in order to purchase the game, countries on your GOG account and IP address must match (VPNs are blocked)
- you can only change your country by contacting GOG support (at this time, you can change it in settings)
- you can request country change only once per certain amount of time (to avoid "quick trips to buy the game cheaper")
Obviously, restrictions like that are unacceptable.

Is regional pricing why my new bank refuses to authorize payment to GOG now? They said the money was going to GOG's office in Cyprus.

The way I see it, people who resort to such questionable tactics just to get the game at the lowest possible price probably would have simply downloaded it via some torrent otherwise. I doubt that many of them would even have considered buying the game at full price. Those who have the money and want to support GOG & CDPR will do so, even if they could somehow get a better deal. Trying to come up with counter-measures such as regional locks is really no different from DRM, since it would only harm the legitimate customers/supporters.

Edit: And yes, I'm going to buy a legitimate "full-price" copy myself, because I'm convinced they're going to deliver a quality product.

No, that was a problem before the introduction of regional pricing. Some US banks don't like dealing with Cyprus.

Some of us (or is it just me ?) was fine with regional pricing provided it wasn't a lazy $=€ scam. GOG did good spending time and ressource updating price according to currency fluctuations as far as I am concerned.

I don't say it's the perfect system at all (some regions probably still have weird pricing ... bulgaria was it ?) but I think it's been done in a fair manner.

This. It would actually hurt a lot of legitimate customers in poorer regions of the world, such as legitimate customers from Ukraine (which the OP mentioned) itself.

Fascinating. I travelled to the Czech Republic for a family visit back in 2009 and had no problems using my credit card to buy 6 games. Although, those were the Good Old Days of Good Old Games, before they introduced all these funky measures.

He was talking about Steam. Steam has all those limitations.

Thankfully I'm being benefited as Steam gives me much cheaper price than US. There's no way I would want to pay in USD right now it's so damn expensive.