Attention!

World of Warcraft is perhaps the only Western MMO to enjoy tremendous success thus far in China, the world's fastest growing market for online games. It's been a difficult road to the top though, if recent news reports are any indication. In addition to government regulations preventing Wrath of the Lich King from releasing for the Mainland, we've reported that The9 has lost the rights to operate World of Warcraft in China to competitor NetEase. Now we learn that the transition of operations from The9 to NetEase will mean World of Warcraft goes dark in China for a matter of weeks.

JLM Pacific Epoch in Shanghai has been following the story and reports that The9 will cease mainland operation of WoW at midnight on June 7th, after four years of continual service. World of Warcraft will return to China in "late June" under the banner of NetEase. It's expected that character data will be preserved with the handover.

http://www.massively.com/2009/06/01/world-of-warcraft-in-china-to-go-offline-for-weeks-in-operator-h/

I was leveling my warrior and got to 58 so far... but now am putting it on hold until after this whole transition. Keep our fingers crossed it's smoother than expected and we're back to our raids and achievements in a timely manner.

havent really followed the situation for a couple of months, apparently Wow is being handed over to Netease if Im not wrong, that means the servers are all down, does anyone know how long should we expect to wait for the servers to reopen?

It's for about 2 weeks

They talked about two weeks ^^ ...BUT!!!
Seems netease is still waiting for the approval of the government to run the game ^^.

We will have our game in two weeks, but if it last longer I wouldn't be surprised.

Still waiting for approval??

They were given the license to run the game when they hadn't got approval from the government to do so?

Man I hope they get it sorted out *reasonably* on schedule. I've come to recognise one thing about China and that is that they always underestimate the time it takes to do something - just hope it's not by too much on this occasion. I'm beginning to really miss checking up on the auction houses... and no doubt my pets are getting very hungry... :S

They could not apply for the approval process until they were officially given the license. It seems inefficient when they know Netease will run WoW on a certain date.

we are probably talking about business war between The9, NetEase and Blizzard so I wouldn't be surprised something coming out of the blue to delay the reopening, just as a revenge.
Besides, it seems that the current trend for the Chinese government is to be not favourable to MMORPG, so ...

On a note aside, I took benefit of the servers being down to test Perfect World yesterday.
Well, it's nowhere near Wow in terms of playability, graphism and game richness. On the other hand, the universe is Chinese (for the fans), it is also free for non harcore players (no need to pay irl money for advanced equipment or for account protection), I do like this idea.
I guess people fed up with Wow would have to migrate to Warhammer or EQ2

Personnaly I've been downloading activly good old games like baldur's gate, icewind dale or planetscape torment. So If they want take one or two months to reopen the servers fine for me ^^