“I cried all night” – After 15 years, millions of players lose their favorite MMORPG

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Since 2008, World of Warcraft appeared in China. But on Tuesday at midnight local time it was over: all the servers of the MMORPG closed in China. The fans are heartbroken.

How do players react to the end of their MMORPG? The Chinese equivalent of Facebook, the platform Weibo, shows how Chinese gamers felt in the first few hours without access to World of Warcraft:

  • “When I woke up, I still couldn’t believe it. I cried in my sleep all night because the game went offline. I dreamed that I started crying in the middle of the class.”
  • Another player called World of Warcraft “his first love” and wrote “I really can’t forget it.”

    • Even a key employee of NetEase, the previous suppliers of WoW in China, writes on Linkedin:

    Just a few hours before Blizzard Games servers go down in China, and that’s a big deal for players in China. Today is such a sad moment watching the servers close and we don’t know what’s next. The greatest victims are those players in China who live and breathe in these worlds.

    What does Activision Blizzard say? In a statement to CNN, they react surprisingly cold-heartedly. They point out that Call of Duty: Mobile for China is still being developed with Tencent and that “potential partners” are in talks to continue Blizzard’s “iconic game series”.

    Compassionate sounds different.

    After all, it has been assured that the progress of all players will be saved.

    We were in the midst of the chaos that is the release of WoW Dragonflight: “I can’t accept anything here”

    Because a partnership breaks up, the Chinese lose their WOW after 15 years

    Why are the servers going offline? We have reported about it several times on MeinMMO. So just in brief:

  • In order to run a game (or do any business) in China, western companies need Chinese partners – the government there wants it that way. The practice has been sharply criticized by Western companies.
  • Blizzard has worked with NetEase since 2008. But the contract has now expired.
  • Blizzard only wanted to extend the contract by 6 months, presumably because Microsoft’s takeover of Activision Blizzard is in the air. NetEase obviously felt offended by this and no agreement was reached. Without a Chinese partner, the servers have to close.

    • After Blizzard separation: NetEase freaks out, destroys orc statue and insults wildly

    How are we discussing this? The grief of the Chinese players also takes away many MMORPG fans in this country. In the reddit forum, people are discussing how one would feel if one loses access to WoW after such a long time. Many players can easily empathize with the situation of the Chinese wow fans:

  • It’s not just the game that you lose, but also the community and friends there.
  • Other reddit users share what it was like for them to quit WoW of their own free will. You put time, energy and money into the game. Losing it all and never getting it back, do something with one.
  • A third reddit user says: Putting almost 20 years into a game? That’s longer than most marriages he’s known.

    • Saying goodbye to MMORPGs is difficult for many players. This shows that MMORPGs are not just a genre like any other, but that MMORPGs thrive on the social bonds you make in an online role-playing game and on the many memories you collect over the years:

    74-year-old says goodbye to his MMORPG after 17 years

    The cover image is an icon image. It shows a man in the Haidan district of Beijing. We got it from Tommao Wang, from the unsplash.com platform.

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