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Blizzard Awaits China's Approval For WoW Relaunch
angry tapir writes "The relaunch of World of Warcraft in China, where it has already been offline for six weeks, still faces an indefinite delay as it awaits government approval for its content. Problems for Blizzard Entertainment, the game's creator, started when it switched to a new local operator for World of Warcraft in China, online gaming company NetEase. New operators of foreign games have to submit the games for government approval, and China has objected to some of the content it found in its latest review of the game."
If I were the CIA, I'd pressure Blizzard to hold off on changes for another 2-3 months. I guarantee you there will be protesters marching in the streets and demanding regime change!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Is it ironic that this news comes from an Australian site which the Australian government has expressed support for filtering of downloaded games ( http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/25/1821235 )?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
China. Pssht. They probably couldn't get more than 1% of the population to play and at $15/month...that's only...um...$150,000,000. A month.
Allrighty let's get China on board here! Start bringing in those tax dollars! (Blizzard does pay income tax for something like this?)
So right now there is some chiness dud that work for the government "reviewing" the content of the game..does he have to level up all the way to level 70 or they hire a power-level company for that and after that they just check the content of the game?? do they have to review all the game quest? do they get GM power from blizz so they can check everything??
The parallels are astounding: Indefinite delays, arbitrary conflicting decisions, and reapproval of already-approved content required when making minor changes!
The Chinese Communist party got tired of people taking their candles.
Test your net with Netalyzr
How many suicides noticed so far because of WoW shutdown? It must be one hell of fun realizing that you actually have *free time* when server is down. (not that your ssh access server downtime would be different)
I'm guessing with the largest population and such there must have been more than one case of severe WoW addiction. If the entire WoW community there is actually surviving 6 weeks of seperation this may be an interesting rejection of the concept of gaming addiction.
The game has been modified to meet the Chinese government's demands before. Skeletons added to the game in an update overseas appeared with flesh in China.
So you can't see people's bones in China but a dead corpse is just fine? I mean, heck, back in the NES days you could play Castlevania and kill skeletons all day long and that was just fine with Nintendo's censorship.
Government objections have also prevented the China release of Wrath of the Lich King, the game's latest expansion. The expansion twice failed to gain government approval despite content revisions, possibly due to elements like the "death knight" character class, according to local media.
So lets see, the Chinese government won't let you have a class called a "death knight" while the government constantly celebrates the "great leap forward" which ended up killing a ton of its own citizens, celebrates the Chinese Civil War as some great achievement which ended up with millions dying. I really don't understand China's censorship, especially since this will give them lots of tax revenue.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This is somewhat off topic, but very related to WoW:
I just went back to a top university to do an MSc. From my childhood onwards I have had a pretty unhealthy addiction to games, we're talking 6-8 hours a day as a kid. It's still very difficult for me to be in a room with a device that games can be played on, and not play instead of e.g. studying.
So I conducted a little trial - by downloading Angband - using the automated 'borg'.
I found that I could actually study, if I just had the screen a few meters away so I could glance at it every once in a while. The game plays itself with all the constraints of a player.
Achievement tendency? Satisfied.
Compulsory collection tendency? Satisfied.
Gradually increased challenge tendency? Satisfied.
Grouping/raid tendency? Well, not, but still.
I was even thinking maybe Blizzard should have a WoW server where bots are allowed.. In a few mins I'm set to read development economics with my warrior churning in the background.
Ahh I was wondering why there are less Chinese gold spam messages in trade chat.
100 trade messages a day. It's amazing they are able to earn a paycheck by playing a game albeit not a lot but I am sure it's better than not working.
Maybe I'm just disgruntled because I spent all day reading proposed healthcare legislation and have decided that if one person puts something stupid forward, he's an idiot, but if a group do the same, it's "compromise."
SIG: HUP
This is just twisted enough to be awesome. We need some high-profile studies on this, STAT.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
It's pretty clear that the real reason for this delay isn't some minor quibble regarding content. It's that China doesn't want a Western/foreign company to dominate their online gaming market.
Clever, unethical (from certain standpoints), and frustrating for Blizzard, no doubt.
Ministry of Culture has just approved the game. The game will be relaunched on Jul 30 in China.
-source: a Chinese IT news website
Remember that article a while ago about China banning Gold Farming?
You think whoever passed the bill is finding alternative ways to enforce the law?
All the gold farmers are out of business!
China insists that a system be put into place to jail WoW characters who advocate democracy for Azeroth.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Tried translating that, and sort of got the gist of it using an online translator here, though a little hard to understand at http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
I won't translate the whole thing, but I noticed this tidbit :
"The people's net - game channel country news General publications administration concerned people in charge on 21st in the evening pay attention to "Evil spirit Beastly World" on the society examine and approve the related question to accept reporter to interview."
World of Warcraft somehow translates to "Evil Spirit Beastly World" here - maybe that doesn't sound like much in western culture, but I'll bet that a lot of Chinese find the thought of a world of evil spirits terrifying, and not something to risk tampering with or provoking. Basing this off "In Chinese thought, the world is populated by a vast number of spirits, both good and evil. Such spirits include nature demons (kuei-shen), evil spirits or devils (oni), and ghosts (kui)." a couple of links I found here and here. Could be one of the factors in the delay.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
The majority of the high level player population in China has already moved on to Taiwanese servers. I don't know if they'll move back once the China servers are back up, especially after the huge delays in getting both TBC and WotLK released there. I also don't know if these high level, "hardcore" players constitute any significant majority of the WoW China playerbase (they probably don't).
I was even thinking maybe Blizzard should have a WoW server where bots are allowed.. In a few mins I'm set to read development economics with my warrior churning in the background.
If Blizzard were to allow such, I don't think it would really help the situation at all.
Instead of people running around clicking buttons, they'd have their bots running around pretending to click buttons, sure. All the while people would be learning how to tweak their bot to make it run that much better than the other guys.
Something similar (while entirely against game rules) happened with FFXI. A plugin (spellcast, iirc) for windower (the third-party DX-grabber that allowed FFXI to run in windowed mode) had people constantly upgrading and trading new/updated INI files to get their gear to switch out in more optimal ways.
As to your points:
Achievement tendency?
Replaced with having the (provably) most efficient bot...
Compulsory collection tendency?
Replaced with finding new tweaks/fixes for your bot code...
Gradually increased challenge tendency?
Each tweak gets harder and harder to find, and generally has smaller and smaller impact on overall bot performance...
Grouping/raid tendency? Well, not, but still.
Forums and chats to discuss new code-blocks, new optimizations, etc.
While I'm not saying that this shift from mindless key-clicking to mindless copy-pasting new sections of code (as many will do just that, only the truly innovative, who today create all those gear spreadsheets and skill trees) is a bad thing, it isn't necessarily a good thing either.
The eagerly awaited Rage of The Ogres: Crush Christians!! Crush Christians!!! is set to hit stores August 15. Preorders have already topped 100 million.
Isn't suppression of Muslims all the rage now in China?
China can fuck right off.
What Blizzard's going through reminds me of my experiences with the AppStore review process...
Those weren't "points" to be refuted line by line, those were his feelings, the things that fueled his gaming addiction. He wanted to stop the addiction because it was distracting him from doing other stuff. Having the bot* playing the game nearby so that he could see it satisfied his game-related urges enough to let him do that other stuff. So even if willing and able to move into the meta-game of modifying the bots, he no longer felt the need to.
That's his subjective psychological response. I would imagine though that it wouldn't be an abnormal one among those who actually want to reduce their game playing. For someone deep in MMO La La Land and such, sure it might be like changing a cokehead's habit from sniffing to smoking rocks.
* Which if it's the one I'm thinking of may not be "provable most efficient", but plays a very conservative game and basically never dies and wins every time.
The enemies of Democracy are
I mean, what other Chinese laws is Blizzard afraid of breaking except for panda violence?
activestudios web design
What is it with americans and breasts? Half of the population have them. Even more, Meat Loaf has a decent pair, remember?
It was from my own experience having been stuck in that MMO La La Land (FFXI) that I provided that response.
When tools like spellcast came out, I was one of the ones who traded the clicky-click rock-smoking for typey-type powder snorting of tool development and advancement.
Also, having traded drug addictions in the past for more socially acceptable addictions (higher intake of nicotine and alcohol), it's still just trading one addiction for another at the end of the day. People just look down on you a little less for it.