Zhang Shule is a columnist for People's Daily Online and People's Post and Telegraph

Warcraft

Does anyone still play?

Who, stayed in World of Warcraft?

After the return of the World of Warcraft national server, optimizing the game experience of players has become the first problem in front of Blizzard.

Blizzard's classic game "World of Warcraft" has finally restarted recently.

Once again, enthusiastic players are crowding the servers.

Recently, queuing for the national server of "World of Warcraft" has become the norm.

Some players found that they could queue up by entering their accounts and passwords casually, so some netizens questioned that the official was engaging in "Yin soldiers queuing".

On the 7th, the official "World of Warcraft" asked "Are so many people queuing up 'Yin soldiers'?" ".

Officially, this is a topic that is not worth refuting, and we really can't think of any benefit to the operation of the game by denying players access to the game by this means.

But at the same time, many players even spend 3 hours waiting to log in to the game.

And after losing more than 500 days, the game has already changed, how can Blizzard retain players?

Blizzard's answer is to optimize the service.

On August 4, World of Warcraft officially announced that it had completed the expansion of some official server servers to optimize the game experience.

In response to problems such as long queue times for players, Blizzard China told reporters that it is working closely with NetEase, using NetEase's local expertise, listening to the voice of the player community, and striving to continuously optimize the game experience of the national server.

Since the suspension of the service on January 23, 2023, a number of Blizzard games, including "World of Warcraft", "Overwatch", "Hearthstone", etc., have been "absent" 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 has reached an agreement with NetEase to continue to provide services for Chinese players in the future. Building on the cooperation that has been completed for more than 15 years, Blizzard and NetEase are working hard to develop a plan for their return.

Blizzard China said it will gradually return to the Chinese mainland market starting this summer under the updated game publishing agreement.

At 6 a.m. on June 27 this year, the World of Warcraft nostalgic costume "Wrath of the Lich King" was the first to be launched.

Soon, enthusiastic players were crowding the servers.

On June 27, World of Warcraft officials announced several times that multiple servers were under high load, and announced measures to optimize servers and slow down queues.

The official server of "World of Warcraft" was officially launched on August 1 this year, and compared with the nostalgic server, the queue of the official server is even worse, and logging into the game has become a problem.

What is the reason behind the server crash?

What are Blizzard's top priorities?

In the future, what is the future development of IP such as "World of Warcraft", and how to face the competition in the domestic market?

In this regard, Hu Lei and Shule of the financial network had an exchange, and this monkey thought:

Warcraft is old, just a dowry girl and bride price in the marriage between Microsoft and NetEase.

In order to show the sincerity of cooperation, NetEase and Blizzard (behind Microsoft) hastily launched Warcraft.

However, it still underestimates the feelings of millions of players on the national server and the resulting short-term rush to the online enthusiasm, which makes it inevitable that the unprepared server will be in frequent situations.

If it's just Warcraft, there's very little Blizzard can do right now.

After all, this is a 20-year-old game, and the core players are already middle-aged, and the enthusiasm to return to the continent of Azeroth will cool down as the time continues after the server is opened.

The IP of World of Warcraft is still strong, but the corresponding sequel has no more extensions except for Hearthstone, and there are no plans for derivation for the time being.

This is no longer suitable for the current environment of mobile games in the Chinese market, nor is it suitable for the general trend of multi-terminal (PC, console, mobile game) data exchange in the global game market.

After the reopening of the national service of "World of Warcraft", it is bound to change from a nostalgic place to a nostalgic memory that gradually fades away.

How to cooperate with NetEase to explore the expansion of Blizzard's IP in the field of mobile games will be the key mission and established strategy of Blizzard and Microsoft in the future.

It's just that World of Warcraft may become a ladder to cross the bridge and then be put down.

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