Games worth discovering

MMORPGs in China Are Planning to Welcome "WOW Refugees"

449 View2022-12-22

On December 16th, NetEase announced they would establish a special server in their Martial Arts MMORPG Justice Online (逆水寒) tailored for World of Warcraft players. The new server will be available on January 13th, 2023, and there will be multiple major gameplay and price strategy changes in that specific server to make the game feel like World of Warcraft. In addition, they will provide a special mount and weapon which were heavily inspired by “Invincible” and “Frostmourne”.

Pictures of the mount and the weapon in Justice Online

Justice Online is not the only game preparing to receive the “refugees” from World of Warcraft China. At the time of the sudden “breakup” between Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase in November 2022, there were over 3 million active players still playing on the Chinese WoW servers. Since then, many MMORPG game providers in China have tried their best to attract those players into their games.

Guild Wars 2 released a special beginner gift box on December 2nd with the slogan: “It doesn’t matter where the heroes are from; it does matter that they have a place to stay.” The page also comes with a picture where an Illidan Stormrage-like dude is riding a mount that looks like Spectral Tiger.

A screenshot of the Guild Wars 2 gift box page shows a character who looks very similar to a WoW character.

On December 6th, JX Online 3 began trending after a player named “The Burning Crusade” spent 130K CNY (~18K USD) on a rare item in the game. People believed the player was a WoW player since their name is the same as WoW’s first expansion. Others suspected it could be a stunt created by JX Online 3’s game provider to attract WoW players.

In Baidu Tieba, a Chinese online community similar to Reddit, WoW’s Tieba is showing other game commercials on its banner. Additionally, players from other games are posting recruitment ads for newcomers, and some of the now former WoW players who tried those games are sharing their impressions of the other MMORPGs to help people decide.