Hmm, I logged onto my copied 60 and had this note next to my portrait:


You have more than 3 hours of online time. You will receive 1/2 money and XP during this period. Your rest state will reset in 5 hours of offline time. Please go rest.


So... you think blizzard is wanting to discourage people from marathon online sessions with a disincentive? I don't think I was supposed to receive this debuff, its a pretty game changing mechanism if introduced in TBC.

Screenshots of it at all?

Either PTR-specific to try and reduce the overcrowding, or some sort of weird bug. There's no way that will go live or is intended.

Haha, it sounds like they accidentally activated China Mode (aka forced rest).

That's exactly what happened:
http://www.joystiq.com/2005/08/24/ch...it-on-mmorpgs/

here's a screenshot:

Genius way to be able to release expansion packs that aren't complete until they've been patched 3-4 times 3-4 months later!

lol... I love the article.

Echoes of Orwell, anyone?

Yep. But I wonder, since the message is in the NA version (English), so there must have been some work done in this regard.

Well, this is a wild guess, but at the software company where I work, we develop stuff in whatever language we speak (here, English) and then the localization people translate it into the appropriate language. Then, just by setting his language flag, the user sees everything in whatever language he chose.

Given that probably whatever dev wrote that code spoke English, he probably wrote it in placeholder text in English regardless of whether the final result was to be used only for China or not.

This is all guessing, of course. :-/

Conspiracy theory alert: I wonder what percentage of players who are level 60 and have a level 60 alt, would finally get around to moving their alt to a new account (25$+$50) so they could play their main for 3 hours, then log on their alt for 2-3 hours of rested (as well as recharging their mains playtime).

This might have more merit than you think and might explain the huge numbers Blizzard sees out of the Asian market...

I'm assuming (and hoping) that this is a bug. I know it's not in beta, so I don't know why it would be added in the 2.0 live patch.

finally your guild killed CThun .. katsching, 70 silver!

It would have to be a bug, since Blizzard would have many angry kids if the 3 hour limit was in place. Someone turned on the wrong flag.

I think a good majority of guilds would have a hard time clearing those old instances in under 3 hours, say, Naxx or AQ40.

Which would result in a monetary penalty for raiders. Which would mean they have to farm for more money outside of instances.. which results in even LONGER online time... repeat cycle.

Of course this may be a moot point in the expansion if all the instances are short 5-person runs. But as it is now, a 3 hour online time is going to be maxxed quickly by anyone running 40-person content.

Why are people debating this as if it's anything other than a bug that turned on the Chinese by-law-required anti-addict code?

Well I doubt it'll make live kazanir, but it would be a funny system designed to try to reduce the load on the test servers ;)

And it is interesting to speculate it's effect if it would make live, interesting yet pointless (hopefully)

They could be adding some parental guidance settings

That or the fact that China alone has anywhere from 4-8x more people than we do depending on who you ask, and a middle class roughly the size of the United States. ;) Over on FoH, Usha Starchild plays on the Chinese servers, and his guild has 600 people in it, and runs 8 raids simultaneously with machine-like precision.

Oh to be Asian.

Half of SFA is still SFA :D