(MHN Sports Esol Reporter) NetEase, whose contract with Blizzard (Activision) is about to expire, is only two months away from the end of World of Warcraft (WOW) service.
In mid-November, Blizzard Entertainment announced that it would end Blizzard game services in China on January 23, 2023.
The works include WoW, Hearthstone, Warcraft 3 Reforged, Overwatch, StarCraft series, Diablo 3, and Heroes of Storm. However, Diablo Immortal continues to maintain the contract as it is separated under a separate contract.
With this contract termination, NetEase’s ‘Chinese version of Lineage’ Epic of Tia is drawing attention in China. Tia Epic is a hardcore MMORPG that started service on March 3, 2019.
True to the stigma of ‘Chinese version of Lineage’, moving itself is money (inducing billing). When reviving after death, actions such as moving to the ‘stamina system’ are severely restricted, and while playing normally to clear a quest, death due to a malicious player’s intrusion (PVP), item looting, etc. It showed the spiciness of ‘MMORPG’.
In particular, the village without a ‘protected space’ also encouraged extreme PVP. In general, villages are set as peaceful areas where PVP is impossible, but the protection system is replaced with the ‘bad karma’ system, and when users who try reckless PKing are eliminated, they choose a method that allows them to sweep items without the ‘bad karma’ penalty. did.
The game, which was compared to WoW at the time of its release in 2019 and was criticized, has seen an influx of ‘refugees’ (users who have left to find new games due to controversy or service termination of existing games) since WoW’s service announcement three years later. has recently been revitalized.
On the bulletin board, which has been complaining about patches and billing policies for a while, posts such as ‘I am a new user’ and ‘Tips for new users’ are occasionally appearing.
Meanwhile, Blizzard took measures to incorporate the Taiwanese server into the ‘global server’ around the same time as the end of service in China. Although it cannot be said that it is a measure to directly prevent the departure of Chinese users, it cannot be said that it is a measure that is not related to this at all.