WoW China: Servers Down for 3 to 6 Weeks

As you guys may remember from a while back, WoW in China is in the process of switching partners. Former provider The9, a Shanghai-based company that ran WoW China for four years, lost those rights after a bout of financial troubles and no launch yet of WotLK. They’ve filed two lawsuits against Blizzard in the aftermath, but didn’t retain rights to distribute the game. The company just ceased powering mainland WoW servers as of 12 a.m. on June 7, according to JLM Pacific Epoch, who has been following the situation.

According to the JLM story, all users’ character data now is in the process of being transferred to Blizzard Entertainment, and soon NetEase.com will be operating servers. And a NetEase affiliate is poised to license WoW for the next three years.

But there’s one slight complication: the transferring of all this data takes time. The first set of servers aren’t set to come back up until late June, and the remaining servers may take several weeks after that, said NetEase CEO William Ding in the story. And who knows what will happen after that. I certainly would suspect such a giant operation to run into some snags along the way. Though, I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for the sake of all the WoW China subscribers that things go smoothly.

Then there’s the issue of unused prepaid subscription cards and security tokens. Just this week, The9 said it would refund the cards that have been bought within 45 days. NetEase, in the meantime, has plans to release its own prepaid cards. I’m sure THAT won’t cause any added confusion to an already complicated situation. /sarcasm.

So it looks like the next few weeks will be quiet for the 3 million+ WoW subscribers in China. If I were them, I’d be on pins and needles just hoping that nothing goes wrong with the transfer.

What do you guys think of the situation? It seems that China is one of, if not the biggest market for WoW, yet they’re going through a rough patch. At least they’ll have a new provider and, with any luck, see WotLK before too long.