Chinese players of World of Warcraft are threatening mass protests over recent collapses and continued problems with the MMORGP.
This comes on the heels of Blizzard Entertainment’s announcement that the 6-million subscriber mark had been broken worldwide and that Spanish localization would be forthcoming.
WoW has been under fire for several months as reports of server issues have plagued the game. Some players have turned to other MMORGPs such as EverQuest in their frustration over long login times. There have also been reports of player against player discrimination and more.
The game is extremely popular in China, with hundreds of thousands of players. It is unclear whether the collapse points to a serious glitch that could affect the game worldwide- where it has millions of players.
"We cannot stand the unstable and busy servers any more and should join up to take action now," a Chinese gamer, under the Internet alias of "kuaikuaikuai" said in the online forum of official portal of WoW. The gamer also posted links to the website of China's Consumer Association for other gamers to report the situation.
Meanwhile, another gamer named "Greedy Mice" called up 200 members of a gaming group, who all complained of severe time delays, long-queue times, and frozen servers, to stop playing WoW to get the attention of The9. The mechanics of the game mean players join groups of other players to form online armies, who interact externally via forums as well as in game.
According to a Chinese WoW player surnamed Mei, about 1,000 Chinese WoW gamers from both 'Horder' and 'Alliance' factions suddenly got disconnected from the game servers when they had almost completed a large joint task 'The Gate of Ahn'Qiraj', sometime late February 2006. The task usually takes a large group of gamers more than 5 consecutive playing hours, and success brings gamers lucrative rewards. These rewards can even be translated into real-world currency if sold on eBay or trading boards.
"We should first collect relevant data and evidence, and will work together with Blizzard to look into this accident and evaluate the loss," Zhang Heng, PR Assistant Manager with The9 told Interfax Monday. "We will provide compensation to those players involved based on the result of the investigation."
As a game operator, The9 cannot solve technical problems without technical support from the game developer Blizzard. Zhang said that the company would identify whether the outage was caused by the game itself or by a local operational problem.
"It may take some time for us to communicate with Blizzard in the U.S., as there is no Blizzard operation in China," said Zhang. The company cannot identify what kind of impact this accident will have on the operation of WoW in China currently."
Interfax
Related:
WoW Hits 6 Million, Adds Spanish
WoW Players Face Discrimination?
Is 5 Million Too Many For World of Warcraft?
WoW Won’t Come To The 360
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