As you may know, Blizzard and NetEase have decided not to renew their partnership in China. As a result, WoW players are wondering what will happen when the servers shut down on January 23, 2023. Will they lose their characters and their progress from the past 15 years? Well no, they will be able to… download them.
Yes, it’s weird said like that. But this is exactly the solution proposed by John Hight to the players of the Middle Kingdom. The producer is trying to reassure players by ensuring that the transition to a new partner will be as smooth as possible, but it also turns out that no company has been appointed yet.
All that is known is that players will soon be able to save their progress to their “personal devices”. This obviously raises questions, especially regarding the possible manipulations that might take place on the data, but the studio is obviously aware of it.
In any case, it will be interesting to see, in practice, how all this will unfold for Chinese players, probably reassured not to see many years of play go up in smoke.
Hello, World of Warcraft CN players:
I hope you have all started exploring the Dragon Islands with your friends. Since posting my last video, you’ve all been interested in what we’re doing to bring World of Warcraft back to you following January 23rd. Additionally, we know you also want to make sure that your current in-game characters, progress, and items will always be with you on your future adventures in Azeroth.
We are currently in discussions with a number of potential new distribution partners in China and this process will continue until we find a suitable solution. At the same time, we know how important your progress in World of Warcraft is to you. So I want to let you know that the World of Warcraft team is working hard to develop a feature that will allow you to save your characters, items, and progress in Azeroth on your personal devices before the game goes live. out of service on January 23.
I would like to remind that this functionality is in addition to the “sealed information” mentioned in the previous NetEase announcement. We hope that the transition to the new partner for the World of Warcraft CN service will be smooth. In addition, thanks to this feature, everyone will be able to keep the history and memory of their game in their hands.
We are working with NetEase to finalize the plan and will post more details on how you can save your game progress in January. We know you will have many questions regarding this feature and when you can return to Azeroth. Stay tuned and we’ll let you know more developments in the future.
Let’s get back in touch in January!
John Hight
Managing Director, Warcraft Productions
