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Clash of Clans Is Now Forcing Chinese Players to Separate from Global Server

18K View2022-02-18

On the night of February 15th, Clash of Clans went through a “technical upgrade” lasted a bizarrely long 14 hours. The next day, Chinese players realized they’re being kicked out from their clans founded by their friend overseas. At the same time, many clans on Chinese server are having foreign members automatically removed by the game system.

Due to video game publishing regulations, all online games have to go through a grueling government evaluation process and have dedicated servers operating in China to separate Chinese players from the rest of the world, for complicated reasons and concerns. Hence games like EVE online which was designed to have all global players on one big server would have to set up a separate branch in China to abide by the regulation.

The regulation was designed in the PC MMO era, and when mobile internet took over, rapid game development processes and technology advances changed the landscape drastically. Games like Clash of Clans still have a separate Chinese server to provide better-localized service, but deep down all player data are shared across all servers, and a Chinese player can easily match up against any other player in the world, or join clans and interact with friends overseas, renders the separation regulation somewhat irrelevant.

For quite a few years, there was no action taken by the Chinese regulators against this newly found loophole, and many games jumped onboard this strategy and developed a similar form of interconnected global server, especially among the asynchronous multiplayer strategy games where internet latency would not be a big issue affecting player experience.

Clearly, this would not be the case anymore. After 8 months of not allowing any new video game to publish and banning all players under the age of 18 to participate in esports, China is still doubling down on regulating its gaming industry with a strong hand.

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