The Burning Crusade expansion pack for World of Warcraft will finally be arriving for Chinese players on September 10. China has not seen any new content for the game since October of 2006, and the number of average users for WoW has dropped from 340,000 in the 4th quarter of 2006 to 300,000 in the 2nd quarter of 2007. This can be directly attributed to the absence of expansions and new content promised by Chinese online game operator The9, and it is speculated that the new anti-addiction measures also held up approval for The Burning Crusade.

According to Gamasutra, “The9 teased its gamers by updating WoW to 2.0. And then silence. The rumor mill went on overtime. Most of the rumors centered on The9’s Soul of Ultimate Nation (SUN), licensed from Korea’s Webzen. The9 launched SUN in April, leading to speculation that technical and marketing resources were diverted from WoW to the launch of SUN. Disgruntled WoW players even tried to organize a boycott to force The9 to refocus their attention on WoW. The boycott had little effect as it asked gamers to spend 10 minutes less each day in WoW, rather than quitting the game altogether. However, one unlucky The9 marketing staff member was beaten up by an angry WoW player while promoting SUN at an Internet cafe. Other gamers in the cafe stood by and watched, applauding the assault.”

Sounds like The9 is no different than most corrupt corporations in China with their pleasant communist style of giving consumers only what they deem in the best interest of their company wallets. For example, the Scourge race had flesh and bones replaced with just flesh and The9 banned 10,000 Chinese words from chats in WoW by replacing slang and profanities with blanks and the Chinese characters for The9’s competitor, Shanda, were banned too.

As many problems as gamers have in America, just be thankful that we still have choices, brand options, and frequent updates to our games - and be thankful that we can spout off any curse words that come to mind at will.