WoW back online in China
by Mike Schramm 
Sep 21st 2009 at 7:00PM
A few more interesting facts have arisen with this news as well: apparently NetEase has spent over a million yuan (about $146,000) per day to keep up and maintain the game and its servers during the past month of closed beta and free play. Of course, that includes customer support and all the other costs.
Even with that price, however, the company is still expected to grow. We haven't heard any population numbers worldwide for WoW since this whole deal began, but you have to think that they lost at least a few players due to all of the problems. Of course, the release of Wrath over there may bring back some players, but even though they were planning to have it out before all of this happened, the switchover has delayed it even further. All they need is more government approval, but as the outage proved, that can sometimes be hard to get.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Realm Status, News items, Wrath of the Lich King, Hardware
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Heanthor Sep 21st 2009 7:03PM
Horray!
ROB13 Sep 21st 2009 7:07PM
Yep, it sure is a good thing that those Chinese servers are back, must of been hell for The9 and I bet they are waiting with open arms to welcome the players back...and rake in the dough.
ROB13 Sep 21st 2009 7:12PM
Whoopsie Doodle, forgot the switched over to NetEase >
Eli Sep 21st 2009 7:06PM
I think with the big downtime alot of the chinese players moved on to aion or a alternative, I think wow lost a good chunk from this.
xxforlifek Sep 21st 2009 9:35PM
that or did what one guild did rerolled on Taiwanese servers
Noah Sep 21st 2009 7:09PM
Even though this is fairly racist, I laughed. Am I a bad person?
AlicanC Sep 21st 2009 7:15PM
Oh my God! What is your problem with linking everything to your own posts? Can't you just put a link to the site that is opened, you know, the one you are friggin' talking about!!!!!
jeff Sep 21st 2009 7:48PM
^^this. I don't even bother clicking on links in the articles anymore, simply because I can never tell which one is actually going to link to the referenced site. If you are going to excessively link to past articles (some posts have been really bad, with links in nearly every sentence!) the least you could do is put some text at the bottom that says Link: Link Name so that people can easily find the article/site you are talking about.
Moonkinmaniac Sep 21st 2009 7:12PM
Won't this just mean more gold farmers for us? Not trying to be racist, but I have trouble seeing this as a good thing.
cowfodder Sep 21st 2009 7:21PM
No, the gold farmers have to be playing on the server they're selling gold on.
jeff Sep 21st 2009 7:49PM
Also, unless you are playing on a Chinese server this really doesn't affect you...
AlicanC Sep 21st 2009 7:20PM
I don't think it will change anything for US or EU players. They won't be able to transfer gold from China servers to our servers anyway...
Deadlock Sep 21st 2009 7:20PM
Well thank god, I was really missing 'wtyrldppp' and his spamming of "YOU BUY GOLD GOOD PRICE"
Lemons Sep 21st 2009 7:21PM
So...do they just start at 3.2? Or are they still back at 3.0 for a while?
Keyra Sep 21st 2009 7:23PM
HI, EVERYONE!!!
GOLD FARMERS ARE ON US SERVERS FOR US PLAYERS!!!
GOLD FARMERS ARE ON EU SERVERS FOR EU PLAYERS!!!
WOW IN CHINA DOESN'T EQUAL GOLD FARMERS FOR US, SO SHUT THE FU** UP ABOUT IT!!!
/endrant
There, I feel better now.
RogueJedi86 Sep 21st 2009 7:42PM
So.........why can't we just restrict Chinese IPs to the Chinese servers? Nothing racist to be downvoted here, just asking a question.
elvendude Sep 21st 2009 7:50PM
@RogueJedi86: IP proxy. It's really, really easy to spoof your IP address.
Agerath Sep 21st 2009 7:57PM
Hello friend!
John Sep 21st 2009 8:08PM
re: IP Proxy
Anyone using a smoothping/lowerping service would fall into this category as well. If Blizzard bans all these users but that would just hurt a lot of genuine customers.
hinu Sep 22nd 2009 9:48AM
I'm an Aussie expat living in HK. There are legit reasons why people with Chinese IPs log onto WoW US and WoW EU.