I am following, and I think the Chinese government is full of it. I also think Blizzard will bend to whatever petty demands the Chinese government makes. You can spread all the FUD you want but, a release for this game is guaranteed. I'd bet real money on it.
There's a very serious chance if you are following what the Chinese regulators are saying.
The Chinese Government want to "do something" about foreign games and protect home grown products. This is a country which is increasing internet censorship, not reducing it. They certainly want more regulation of games.
For now, the vanilla World of Warcraft seems to be ticking along very nicely without Acti-Blizzard rocking the boat. Especially as they have moved away from The9 into a much better deal. If I was them I would conclude that StarCraft II is a much better growth opportunity and it would be much more important to keep the regulators hands out of that than Lich King. They've already been told it's not coming out unless they make substantial changes and it still hasn't got a release date.
@deftangel, I believe the main issues is not networth of zukaus, or any other player which goes long on WoW:WotLK.
The main issues is because me (and probably some other high networth players) are not willing to short this stock extensively. Why ? Because we are still trying to grow our networth the fastest possible way, and dumping all of our spare networth in this stock is not the best way to achieve that goal.
Having said that, I am pretty sure that sooner or later, this stock will move down, especially if China really didn't allow WoW to be played or sold there.
BTW, zukaus currently have 13.7K stocks of this game. Which means around 30 Million DKP investment at current price point.
There is a similar discussion I'm having in another thread. I've a 10m short on this stock which is way over my 33% networth. I physically can't put any more in and the movement today has put me into a margin call. I've already had to reluctantly buy back shares in this just to avoid my portfolio getting ripped apart even more.
I have to be honest, I don't think the gold farming is a big deal in terms of WoW sales but the price of this is directly contradictory to increasing uncertainty about it's release in it's largest single territory.
Yup it is pretty lame that the spread between Buy/Sell on stocks 1k DKP+ can be manipulated so easily by those with 20 million+ such that the TSE becomes basically a caricature worse than vgchartz.
I've watched this stock go from 1850-2100 today on minimal volume.
Apparently there is little wisdom of the TSE crowd- or at least no one is willing to put up their money where their mouth is so that this stock reflect reality. I've made a ton shorting this stock, but for what really, some reflection of actual sales potential?
But the TSE has never been about reality has it? It's too bad since that was what attracted me and many others to this site a couple of years ago.
I'm considering dropping this site from my radar completely. Previously I'd established you weren't welcome in intelligent conversation if you weren't part of the clique to the point of being banninated.
Now that I've built up more cash I've seen a ton of stock gaming in the exact opposite direction of sense or related news/comments.
Clearly this is a game to lengthen each other's e-peen, rather than any sort of effort to provide useful information. IPOs used to be widely discussed, vetted, and even most games coming out had IPOs now its the only way to make money- solely by pumping and dumping before the stock dies. Stocks that should have been de-listed some time ago, still idle.
Most of the stocks I trade these days (or even make any sort of money on) are day old IPOs or some overprices stock one guy alone is pushing into the stratosphere.
I'm just going to stop playing. It's really too bad, since the TSE, better managed, and with an actual sense of community might have been a really good thing. It never really delivered on its promise and I see that what is left of the community is basically committed to running this site into the ground.
Incidentally, the article estimates there are around 400,000 gold farmers working in Asia though the number of "accounts" are likely to be much more as they tend to play multiple accounts simultaneously.
I wouldn't want to over-egg the fact but I'd put it as mid-single digits percentage of the total WoW userbase.
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I am following, and I think the Chinese government is full of it. I also think Blizzard will bend to whatever petty demands the Chinese government makes. You can spread all the FUD you want but, a release for this game is guaranteed. I'd bet real money on it.