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Blizzard's classic game "World of Warcraft" has finally been restarted in China.

Enthusiastic players have overwhelmed the servers. Recently, queues have become the norm for the Chinese version of World of Warcraft. Some players even have to queue for hours before they can enter the game.

On August 4, the official World of Warcraft announced that it had completed the expansion of some official servers and optimized the gaming experience.

"We have always been deeply moved and inspired by the enthusiasm of domestic players for World of Warcraft. We are also very excited about the recent re-launch of World of Warcraft, because our domestic players can reunite and play in Azeroth with their relatives and friends again." A person related to Blizzard China told the Securities Times e-company reporter.

In response to issues such as long waiting times for players, relevant personnel from Blizzard China told reporters that they are working closely with NetEase, leveraging NetEase's local expertise, listening to the voice of the player community, and striving to continuously optimize the gaming experience on the national server.

Since the service was shut down on January 23, 2023, many Blizzard games including "World of Warcraft", "Overwatch", "Hearthstone", etc. have been "away" from domestic players for a year and a half.

On April 10 this year, Blizzard China announced that after continuous discussions over the past year, it had reached an agreement with NetEase to continue to provide services to Chinese players in the future. Based on the past cooperation of more than 15 years, Blizzard and NetEase are working hard to formulate a return plan. Blizzard China stated that it will gradually return to the Chinese mainland market starting this summer based on the updated game distribution agreement.

"World of Warcraft" is a classic MMO (massively multiplayer online game) game under Blizzard. The IP of "World of Warcraft" has a huge influence on the domestic player community. After Blizzard officially announced its return, "World of Warcraft" was also the product that returned the fastest.

At 6 am on June 27 this year, the "World of Warcraft" nostalgic server "Wrath of the Lich King" was launched first. Soon, enthusiastic players crowded the server. On June 27, the official "World of Warcraft" announced several times that many servers were under high load, and announced measures to optimize the servers and reduce queues.

The official server of "World of Warcraft" was officially launched on August 1 this year. Compared with the nostalgic server, the queues for the official server are even longer, and logging into the game has become a problem.

On the morning of August 1, the official World of Warcraft announced that due to the excessive number of players using value-added services such as character upgrades at the same time, some value-added services were temporarily closed to ease server pressure. At noon that day, the official game announced that in order to ensure the stable operation of the server, maintenance of the official World of Warcraft server would begin at dawn the next day. After the maintenance, value-added services such as character upgrades would be enabled again.

However, the queue situation of World of Warcraft has not eased. On Weibo, some netizens said that they started queuing at 3 pm that day and only got in at almost 6 pm. Even well-known e-sports commentator Guan Zeyuan complained that he had to wait in line for 2 hours on weekdays and 4 hours on weekends before he could enter the game on the servers where several main characters in the game were located.

In order to ease the queuing situation, on August 4, World of Warcraft officially announced that the capacity of multiple official servers, including Deathwing, Silver Hand, and Ronin, has been expanded. World of Warcraft officially expressed that it was sorry for the poor gaming experience caused by the server queuing, and believed that this adjustment could greatly ease the queuing situation.

"We will also continue to pay attention to the backend data and players' feedback and actively respond to various issues. We will handle those that can be handled by the operator as soon as possible. For those that require support from the development team, we will also immediately feedback the demands of domestic players to Blizzard." said the "World of Warcraft" team.

On August 5, relevant personnel from Blizzard China also responded to the Securities Times e-company reporter that they are working closely with NetEase, leveraging NetEase's local expertise, listening to the voice of the player community, and striving to continuously optimize the gaming experience of the national server.

In addition to World of Warcraft, which has officially returned, the return of many Blizzard games is currently in progress. At the 2024 ChinaJoy exhibition held at the end of July, the Blizzard team announced the latest news about the return of another classic popular game, Hearthstone.

Nathan, the executive producer of Hearthstone, said that the Chinese version of Hearthstone will return on September 25 this year. Chinese players will also get all the cards that they missed in 2023 for free. Hearthstone called this an "unprecedented" return compensation in history.

Editor: Chen Lixiang

Proofreader: Yang Lilin