Monday, August 29, 2005
China and MMORPG
Thanks to John for pointing out www.interfax.cn, a Chinese news site, which reports on some "interesting" new government regulations regarding MMORPG. I have no idea if this is a very elaborate hoax, or the strangest news on MMORPG I've ever read. Seems some Chinese government institution came up with some regulations to make games more "healthy".
One is to forbid games to give out rewards for PvP.
Another one orders game developers to make their games give out diminished rewards after 3 and 5 consecutive hours of playtime. This is to prevent people from playing too much.
What strikes me as very peculiar is that these rules have obviously been made by somebody who understands MMORPG very well. Instead of banning games with PvP, or kicking people out after 3 to 5 hours, these "unhealthy" activities are simply made unattractive by giving out less or no rewards. For PvP that will certainly work, in WoW PvP isn't already terribly popular, and if you removed the rewards, Alterac Valley would never fill up. The policy to diminish returns after 3 hours of consecutive play will simply cause people to have 2 or more accounts under different names.
In a way the latter policy already exists in WoW, with the rest bonus xp. And UO had a power hour, where you gained double skill gains in the first hours every 24 hours. So by telling people they get "double xp in the first 3 hours", you could make that new policy pretty palatable.
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Hmmm, doesn't seem to be a hoax. At least it is now also reported by the Financial Times, of which you would expect some serious research in the subject before reporting it.
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