Friday, May 2, 2008

The9 Manually Set Chinese Realms' Isle of Quel'Danas Progress

The9, the company that operates World of Warcraft in China has announced today that all Chinese realms will have their Isle of Quel'danas progress manually set to be fully completed, since "all players have contributed as they should to the world event". They also apologized for the server problems players experienced these past few weeks, while wishing everyone a happy Mayday (a four-and-a-half day holiday this year in China).

This rather drastic measure comes amidst widespread player complaints of their servers' poor performance after patch 2.4. Many of the more populous realms suffered frequent restarts and periods of downtime, especially at peak hours. As a result, a significant number of these realms also fell victim to rollbacks. Some of the hardest hit realms had their IQD progress reset multiple times in a single day.

While most players welcome the gesture, many can't help but feel this kind of measure doesn't solve the underlying problem, that The9's servers are of questionable quality. There are also others who feel that having the IQD world event come so arbritarily to an end makes the game less immersive. In addition, The9's approach comes off as employing brute force, since they could just properly set the progress of individual realms back to their approriate stage (although I personally think it's great to have the epic gem vendor and what not available to us so soon).

The9's servers has long been a source of frustration for Chinese WoW players. Many irate players refers to them dryly as "Little Overlords", a brand of cheap basic home computers (or "learning machines" as they were advertised) popular in China in the 90's that were less powerful than Commodore 64s.

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