The other half of online gaming oversight from the Chinese government came today. Soon, leading games in China (including WoW) will institute measures designed to dissuade players from playing constant hours, in order to combat “sloth, truancy and even murder”. The exact measures are, at this point, a tad hazy, as each source I’ve found on the topic gives a slightly different account of what’s going on. One description is as follows.

The anti-addiction system cuts in-game benefits to players after three hours. For most games this will mean awarding fewer “experience points” to fantasy characters and reducing the value of virtual goods such as magic weapons that they acquire.

After five hours online, players will be subjected every 15 minutes to the warning: “You have entered unhealthy game time, please go offline immediately to rest. If you do not your health will be damaged and the benefits you can win will be cut to zero.“

Here’s another:

The new system, developed under the guidance of GAPP, cuts the ability level of a player’s online game character by half after they have played for more than three consecutive hours. Once a player has played for more than five consecutive hours, the system cuts the ability level of that player’s character to the lowest level allowed by the game. Players must be logged off for a minimum of five hours before the system resets.

The system also lowers the ability of players to find treasures or prizes available in an online game after they have played for more than three consecutive hours, but it does not at any point actually prevent the user from playing the game or communicating with others online. Development of the system is scheduled for completion at the end of September 2005 and will become compulsory by at least spring 2006.

Here’s a third:

The system will only award players full experience points for the first three hours of each day, half experience for the next two hours, and no experience after five hours.

So it sounds like it’s a reverse Power Hour concept – at 3 hours, there is some sort of penalty to your advancement rate and/or character power, and at 5 hours, that degradation becomes almost all-encompassing. One article mentions as an aside that loot gathering may be affected as well.

Numerous questions spring to mind, and none of these articles seem to offer an answer.

  • Given that a lot of the gameplay of any MMO is socializing, will this really do much more than frontload the powerlevelling?
  • Will this make the games more antisocial and less sticky? In UO, power hour did create an issue where players didn’t want to waste time chatting with friends until power hour had concluded, for fear of wasting that precious time.
  • If you were to enter the market with an MMO with little in the way of advancement (such as a Puzzle Pirates or TSO-style game), would that be affected? Does it need to be?
  • Is this for the whole account? What happens if you play with an alternate account? Is there anything to keep you from playing another online game?
  • Can anyone else see a future where developers of online games go crazy trying to satisfy the different legal requirements of different territories?

Things that make you go ‘hmmmm’.

The original comments thread is here.