Chinese WOW returns after two months News
MMO News by Robert Purchese
The Chinese World of Warcraft servers are back online after an enforced two-month hiatus while the government checked out a swap in local operators.
Subscribers will not be charged for the period, and veteran players will be given a special pet.
Blizzard ditched The9 for rival provider NetEase on 7th June; a move the authorities scrutinised and soon picked holes in. Gamasutra claims government regulators took issue with the depiction of undead to children playing the MMO.
Those problems have been solved, but the the damage has been done, as reports reckon the downtime cost approximately $150,000 every day. Harder to quantify is the potential player loss the outage has resulted in: two months of no service in the world's biggest online market must hurt, even if Blizzard makes less money from Asia than other regions.
Running a global operation like World of Warcraft costs a lot of money. Exactly how much, Blizzard's J. Allen Brack attempted to describe at the Game Developers Conference in Austin, Texas last week.
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Comments: 1-16 of 16 in total
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Actually it has been running under Netease since July 30 (a "public beta" that's free for all existing players). Now it begin to accept new registerations and start charging. Though the outage hurt user base quite a bit (once stopped playing people starting to realize there are other things to life... or other MMOs)
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Camorrista
22/09/09 @ 09:47
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"failed to generate a profit of 9 million due to downtime" != "cost 9 million"
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Those problems have been solved, but the the damage has been done, as reports reckon the downtime cost approximately $150,000 every day.
And yet the Gold Farmers its business as usual with trade spam, enviroment spam, mail spam :( Maybe Blizz should charge 10% of whatever Farmers make to turn a blind eye to their activities? |
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i love how people talk about gold sellers as this fucking SCOURGE of humanity.
I've played the game since 2005. I think i get about one letter a month from a gold seller, and maybe one whisper. The way the internet acts up, you'd think that people couldn't move five feet without being harassed by the ENTIRE population of china |
Comments: 1-16 of 16 in total
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