Players threaten mass protest against World Of Warcraft in China

With the recent large-scale collapse of the WoW severs in China, players are furious and have threatened to stop playing the game in a mass protest.  In China, the game is operated by a company called The9 Limited, and with the recent massive server disruption wide scale concern is spreading quickly to North America.  Speculation that there could be an issue with the game is sparking some interest in North America, with the fear that this glitch could affect the game world wide and potentially disrupt the service for millions of people.

Zhang Heng, PR Assistant Manager with The9 stated on Monday, “We should first collect relevant data and evidence, and will work together with Blizzard to look into this accident and evaluate the loss… we will provide compensation to those players involved based on the result of the investigation.”  Since The9 is only a game operator it is not their responsibility to solve game related problems and this initiative must be taken by Blizzard.  Although the source of the issue has yet to be determined, The9 has stated that once they determine if the outage was caused by a local problem or by a game glitch they would contact Blizzard technical support to resolve it.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time WoW players in China have had to deal with server instability and random disconnects. In September 2005, The9 released a statement saying that, “Blizzard would make effort to improve WoW game servers in order to prevent outage accidents and protect the rights of players. The company will also increase the number of game servers, and enhance the load capacity of game systems.”

As of the fourth quarter of 2005, WoW in China hit a peak of approximately 530,000 users, 270,000 being online simultaneously.  This sent The9s 2005 revenues to hit US 26.3 million, leaving them with a net profit of US 8.5 million, which shows just how crucial the operation of WoW is to the firm’s growth.
With the recent large-scale collapse of the WoW severs in China, players are furious and have threatened to stop playing the game in a mass protest.  In China, the game is operated by a company called The9 Limited, and with the recent massive server disruption wide scale concern is spreading quickly to North America.  Speculation that there could be an issue with the game is sparking some interest in North America, with the fear that this glitch could affect the game world wide and potentially disrupt the service for millions of people.

Zhang Heng, PR Assistant Manager with The9 stated on Monday, “We should first collect relevant data and evidence, and will work together with Blizzard to look into this accident and evaluate the loss… we will provide compensation to those players involved based on the result of the investigation.”  Since The9 is only a game operator it is not their responsibility to solve game related problems and this initiative must be taken by Blizzard.  Although the source of the issue has yet to be determined, The9 has stated that once they determine if the outage was caused by a local problem or by a game glitch they would contact Blizzard technical support to resolve it.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time WoW players in China have had to deal with server instability and random disconnects. In September 2005, The9 released a statement saying that, “Blizzard would make effort to improve WoW game servers in order to prevent outage accidents and protect the rights of players. The company will also increase the number of game servers, and enhance the load capacity of game systems.”

As of the fourth quarter of 2005, WoW in China hit a peak of approximately 530,000 users, 270,000 being online simultaneously.  This sent The9s 2005 revenues to hit US 26.3 million, leaving them with a net profit of US 8.5 million, which shows just how crucial the operation of WoW is to the firm’s growth.