One of the ways Blizzard has been controlling the spread of chinese farming is allowing them to play WoW in China using their own version of the game when playing their own WoW Accounts rather than the US version.
China is a big market for World of Warcraft, but with so much abuse of the TOU of Blizzard’s policies, they were forced to take it off line in China for weeks. Blizzard has recently allowed a partial re-launch of World of Warcraft in the country for some players. Blizzard will still require many changes to the game content they find so objectionable.
The re-launch happened on July 30th nearly eight weeks after is shut down operations on line in China. Apparently to curtail the rabid abuses that were taking place, Blizzard has agreed to re-launch their popular product, but only to previously registered Blizzard Entertainment subscribers.
When World of Warcraft creators, Blizzard Entertainment, entered a partnership agreement with NetEase the Chinese Internet company, it was to move the operations to a local operator of internet services. However, the country’s government requires that new operators of foreign online games must apply for a license and have the game’s content screened to be sure it meets Chinese governmental standards. Being that the new partnership requires a new license, Blizzard Entertainment may only offer their services to their existing client base and not to the citizens of China as a whole until the content is approved by the government review board, and a new license is issued. Once the license is issued, World of Warcraft will be open for business and Blizzard Entertainment will be able to re-launch fully in China.
It is China’s cultural ministry which has the responsibility of reviewing and approving the World of Warcraft content. The word is that the ministry has indeed reviewed and approved the WoW content.
However The General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) confirmed by phone that some content they reviewed during their checks t will require modification by Blizzard or NetEase. GAPP is the Chinese agency in charge of regulating print and online publications.
The official new agency, Xinhua citied an unnamed GAPP official and released the information about the re-launch. They said that GAPP will indeed allow World of Warcraft to open up for “internal testing” while the content changes are still in progress.
As previously stated, per the GAPP official, players with existing World of Warcraft accounts may be reinstated prior to the license being issued. New players will not be allowed to sign up for subscription services until the license is officially issued. This means that NetEase will be barred from charging for subscriptions services while the game was offline for the past two months, nor until the license is officially issued. It is the GAPP agencies opinion that this will ease in a smooth transition of user data from the operator switch.
At first it was not clear if NetEase would indeed participate in the partial re-launch to existing customers while compensation for subscription fees could not be charges to players. Both Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase were contact for comments, but no immediate reply was made by either corporation.
World of Warcraft is indeed amongst the leaders in MMO subscription games in the country of China. It is largely a young male dominated market, and these players play the game for not only hours but for nights at a time in popular internet cafes with friends. Local Chinese media reports that the players in China total over five million currently. That would total approximately forty percent of the global market subscribers reported by Blizzard at the end of the 2008 year.
The Chinese forums had mixed reviews in response to the Chinese governments actions. Some players were celebrating the free playing time and the return of one of their favorite pastimes. Others were skeptical due to the strain on the user base caused by the two month downtime.
During the past two month downtime, the onslaught of Chinese users would temporarily put enough strain on the old Taiwanese server that is would cause hour long waits just to login to the game. The Chinese government in the past has made content changes that required Blizzard to change skeletons to regular human form bodies, just as an example.