Not quite chit-chat, but not tech..

[MoonWitch]

Has anyone ever encountered these? I am seriously hoping they're part of the parental controls :P

PLAYTIME_TIRED = "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 %d hours of offline time. Please go rest. ";
PLAYTIME_TIRED_ABILITY = "You have more than 3 hours of online time. You cannot perform this action during this period. Your rest state will reset in %d hours of offline time. Please go rest. ";
PLAYTIME_UNHEALTHY = "You have more than 5 hours of online time. You will not be able to gain loot, XP, or complete quests. Your rest state will reset in %d hours of offline time. Please log out to get rest and exercise.";
PLAYTIME_UNHEALTHY_ABILITY = "You have more than 5 hours of online time. You cannot perform this action. Your rest state will reset in %d hours of offline time. Please log out to get rest and exercise.";

[Cairenn]

They're for the Asian market, specifically the Chinese client, not sure about any of the other Asian clients. They might also be part of the parental controls in other clients, but I'm not positive about that.

[Phanx]

China only. China has restrictions on how long you can stay logged into online games, due to the number of people getting so obsessed with them that they forget to feed their babies or themselves, resulting in someone dying. I think Korea has had some incidents like that, too, but AFAIK they don't (yet) mandate playtime limits.

[10leej]

I remember they also had something like this during the Vanilla beta as well, glad they haven't implemented that into the US client.

[MoonWitch]

Originally Posted by Phanx China only. China has restrictions on how long you can stay logged into online games, due to the number of people getting so obsessed with them that they forget to feed their babies or themselves, resulting in someone dying. I think Korea has had some incidents like that, too, but AFAIK they don't (yet) mandate playtime limits.

Oh right now that you mention it..
I do however fail to understand how you can "forget" to feed yourself or your children. Honestly. I mean, it's not the responsibility of a game maker, government or anyone but the player... But that's opening a can of worms in regards to a discussion isn't it?

[Phanx]

I can understand being in the middle of a serious raid and getting thirsty and going "well, I guess I'll have to wait for a break to refill, or the end of the raid at worst", but to just keep putting it off until you die? That's just insane. What can you even be doing in-game that's that engrossing for that long? ???

I do agree that it should be the player's responsibility to not kill themselves or their children, but China in general is extremely overbearing when it comes to controlling their citizens' online activity. To create a Chinese WoW account you need to supply your Chinese ID number, which I guess is the equivalent of a US Social Security number... presumably this prevents you from creating multiple accounts and switching between them to circumvent the playtime limit, though I don't know whether there's some centralized system game server operators are required to connect through to make sure players aren't just switching to a different game every 5 hours.