That sounds like a screw up of the highest proportions, on both sides though I'm very suspicious of the whole WoW operation in China.

I heard rumours about the whole mess with TheNine with some sort of WoW clone rumoured to be seen on their website, although the MMO changed after the announcement to look like a street fighter 2 MMO - very weird, when I saw it it looked like the sort of front page you could make up in 5 minutes with photoshop, but a real mish-mash of games that makes no sense. Either way TheNine are suing Blizzard in Chinese courts about the loss of the WoW license although the contract was up for renewal anyway so was not cancelled early, but I'd rather not be out there trying to win your case as a foreign company.

There had to be some seriously bad stuff going on to cause the loss of contract for starters, and it seems like the Chinese government are involved, they seem very nationalistic over there in that they won't allow money to go abroad (e.g. their coal technology is crap yet they won't use their dollar reserves to buy cleaner and more efficient gear from the US when they can buy more garbage from a Chinese firm). There is some sort of weird problem where the government are stopping the Wrath of the Lich King expansion from being released there because of some cultural problem with skeletons being in the game, sounds like a load of bull to me, hence people who can are logging on over in Taiwan to play the expansion.

And then there is the whole Chinese gold farming thing, I'm deeply suspicious of this whole thing here, EQ2 at least on the server I play is free of plat farmers and I've not received any spam from them in the years I've been playing it that I can remember. I think this is a combination of game design (needing status for items, and not being able to buy much with plat from vendors at least at my level that is endgame good).

Then on the other hand WoW has a few big ticket gold sinks in it that like epic flying mount (5000g), multi person mount with vendors (~16k gold) and a epic ring that teleports and is raid level (~8k) that are just begging for someone to do a rmt transaction to get. If you log onto any wow server and look around the alliance faction you'll see corpse art advertising gold selling sites, be spammed at least once every 5-10 minutes in trade channel and be whispered a few times a day to buy gold along with receiving a box full of spam in your in game mail box. This last category of spam is the most puzzling, once its known you'd think it would be simple to just delete anything from that user through the entire server, they already do this when some ones character is deleted yet I've seen such gold spam persist for the full 30 days every time.

I'm seriously wondering if part of the deal for WoW in China is to turn a blind eye to all this, it could give them Chinese supporters that get the support of the right officials, if its not then they are running the most pathetic attempt at stopping it seen in the history of MMO's.

Well I read somewhere that the Chinese were playing for 6 cents an hour equivalent, I think this gives some credibility to my theory that Blizzard panicked (or at least reacted) when Age of Conan launched in Europe taking a large chunk of players away from WoW for a short period of time at least since at those prices a European player is worth a heck of a lot more then a Chinese one.

As for government involvement, I think so although probably more of self interest from its members coupled with Chinese nationalism then high up policy.

Certainly sounds like the Chinese Gov't was behind thetake down:


World of Warcraft Allowed Partial Relaunch in China

Amazing how much that might hurt blizzards bottom line when you think about it...