Long Cheng Internet, the New Taipei City-based agent for Chinese online game Lan Yan Qing Meng (藍顏清夢), on Friday said that it would offer full refunds to players abandoning the game following a unilateral, temporary “shutdown” of Chinese gaming platforms.
The firm said that 116 Taiwanese players have complained about being banned from the game or blocked from its public chat, reportedly after they made complaints or called COVID-19 the “Wuhan pneumonia.”
The players have said that Long Cheng Internet — who they thought was the game’s developer and producer — infringed on their freedom of speech.
The complaints were prompted by an unannounced server update on April 3, when game developers including NetEase, Tencent and Shengqu answered a Chinese government call to halt gaming that day to honor those who died from COVID-19.
The players were unhappy that purported “server maintenance” had affected players in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.
Long Cheng Internet on Friday said that it would offer full refunds to players quitting the game over the incident, including for in-game currency that has already been spent.
Citing the Regulations on Items to be Included in Standard Service Contracts for Internet Games, New Taipei City Consumer Protection Office official Wang Chih-yu (王治宇) said that firms managing games should notify users seven days prior to system maintenance or other events that cause services to be halted.
Expectations for Chinese game developers to uphold players’ freedom of speech are harder to meet, he said.
Local agents can only relay players’ suggestions to the developers, but it is ultimately the producer that makes such decisions and it would be difficult to regulate them under Taiwanese law, he added.
Consumers can express their dissatisfaction by either not playing or refusing to spend money on games, Wang said.
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