Chinese servers

About

 * operated by Shanda (盛大网络, http://www.snda.com/cn/index.aspx)
 * 16 or so servers
 * service closure
 * no character transfer offered

Timeline
Repost of Ustice taken from Forum post

''I wrote the original post on the US DDO forums. A friend of mine helped me to create the thread because I do not have an active account on the US servers yet. For the same reason I can’t post replies, so here is the life and death of DDOC (DDO China). I don’t always keep a clear track of time, so the following content may not be entirely accurate.'' (Kane Gao)

June 28, 2006
DDO hits the market in China. It’s just an alpha test, and restricted to invited players only. Anyone could apply for an invitation on the official Chinese site, only some of them would actually get it. DDO became an instant success, and all servers (three in all) were populated with merry players.

August 8, 2006
Alpha test ends; however, what followed was “the second alpha test” according to the operator (a company called Sanda). Some players abandoned the game because all characters in each account were deleted by the system at the end of “the first alpha test.”

August 28, 2006
After a short period of 20 days, the so-called “second alpha test” also came to an end. Once again Characters were deleted, and a few more players left. Open Beta test began. More servers came online. All 20 servers were divided into three groups.

February 7 to 11, 2007
Server merge. Players had long been complaining about the decline of online population on almost all of the servers. Some servers are nearly abandoned. Original 20 servers were merged into only five.

Mid-September
Server upgrade to Module 4.1. The upgrade encountered a serious problem, and caused a half month delay. Servers had been offline until the problem was finally solved. Lots of players were angry about this half month of boredom. DDOC official forum was flooded with complaints. More players left the game.

January 1, 2008
End of beta test. Sanda finally began to collect a monthly fee from DDO players. Until that day, Sanda hadn’t made a single cent from the game. The monthly fee is 30 Yuan (around 5 USD), which is totally acceptable. Most players became subscribers by paying the fee. However, population on each server had already dropped to a dangerous level.

Around March, 2008
“The Great Migration”. Due to the problem of online population, subscribers began to migrate to servers with higher populations. Some servers were nearly completely abandoned. By “migrate” I mean creating a new account, paying another monthly fee, and losing all characters in original account. Sanda didn’t offer any help such as migrating subscribers’ original accounts.

April 24, 2008
The beginning of the end. Sanda began an upgrade to Module 6.0. Once again the development team faced a major problem. There was an official notification saying that DDO servers would be online again as soon as the problem was solved. The fact is that they were never online again. The contract between Turbine and Sanda should expire in late June or early July. Since Sanda had made DDO a notorious failure in Chinese market, there’s no reason to expect another company to adopt it. Thus dies DDO in China.

China Servers Offline for 2+ Months. Players Blocked from All US Servers.

July 2, 2008
DDO Forum post and reports from Chinese players that the DDO China servers are offline, and have been for some time, as well as that players are blocked from all US servers. Thus information and communication is limited and has been spotty at best, as Chinese players are also blocked from the US forums.

Report by Kane Gao was posted by Ustice which list the timeline and give some insights (reposted and consolidated into the time line above).

"The addiction proofing module"
This is a concoction from Chinese government. They believe that gaming (especially online and MMO games) addiction has been harming youngsters in this nation. So the government forced each online game operator to add such a module into their product. With it added on, each user must make an identity verification to make sure he/she is an adult. The user can only play a certain game with the module for limited hours per day if he/she is without a verification or verified to be a minor. An online game without this module would be regarded as illegal; however, it looks like that the module isn’t well designed and causes some bugs to games from time to time. According to a Sanda staff, the two serious problems emerged in server upgrading were both caused by this module.

Server IP block & internet censorship
We both know that Chinese government has a nasty habit of censoring various contents on internet. I saw that some users on DDO US forum raised a point that we can’t access US server because of the government censorship. I won’t agree with that though, because:
 * The Chinese government is known for internet censorship, but usually with a proper reason, usually for political reasons, but DDO US is simply a fantasy game with nothing to do with politics. Yes, many sites were censored from Chinese internet users after the Tibet problem made a big bang this March, But we lost access to US server before that incident.
 * Some US forum user discussed the possibility of ISP censoring. Interesting things against that possibility are happening at the moment: a few Chinese players actually could log into US server and visit the forum WITHOUT A PROXY. It is unlikely that the ISPs makes exceptions in censoring something from only some users. If they block a site, it is blocked from all users.
 * The only reasonable explanation: It’s Turbine who’s blocking Chinese IP address. They lack both the power like Chinese government to control all data-flows from China to US and the ability to control a large amount of users completely like local ISPs. So they are blocking common Chinese IP address segments. China is a huge country though, users in certain regions have uncommon IP address. That’s why there are exceptions.

Farmer/Seller problem
It has been said that “Turbine sets up the blocking to get rid of farmers & sellers”, “DDOC also had a problem of farmer/seller spamming;” however, the problem is that IP blocking will never be a working method to silence farmer/sellers. They’re professionals. They make a living by spamming, there’s no way you could ever get rid of them by a simple IP blocking mechanic. The only ones who are blocked out are common players (and potential subscribers).

Time-Limited Quests
This is an idea invented by Sanda. In the beginning days of DDOC, there weren’t enough quests for devoted players, and Turbine didn’t offer updates fast enough. All that we had to do was to repeat some major quest again and again, because after you finish trying basically everything the only attraction left was XP. Apparently Sanda felt that some quests were over-heated, and to respond they introduced a “Time Limited” system. That is, popular quests are open to players for only on specific time on specific days. This was somewhat over-done, and most times we had nothing to do. A lot of players talked about to leave DDOC after this ridiculous system was activated, and most of them really did.