#0 - Nov. 15, 2007, 12:07 a.m.
Rudd to bring World of Warcraft to Australia
Thursday, 15 November 2007
Canberra
Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd today pledged to bring World of Warcraft servers to Australia, claiming the government should be doing more to decrease latency, and dependency on American hardware. Labor believes the government has neglected the needs of ordinary Australians who want to escape the harsh realities of every day life. As one senior Labor Policy Adviser put it “John Howard has been escaping reality for years”.
Mr.Rudd today stated that a Labor Government would address this need, describing it as in the national interest, and vital to the welfare of the many young people embarking on a voyage into the world of virtual reality gaming. Senior policy advisers believe that this fits neatly with Labors plan to bring broadband to the masses.
The Rudd opposition believes that the benefits far outweigh any negatives on a cost basis alone. Several servers in Australia would be suitable for hundreds of thousands of the foreign legion.
A long time concern of many in the Australian online gaming community, many Warcraft players are left to languish in servers hosted in the United States, including so-called Oceanic servers, whose only concession to the many pacific region players is that server time is based around Eastern Standard Time.
Labor also announced it would subsidise the transfer cost for players wishing to play on the Australian servers, and guaranteed the creation of hundreds of jobs in a special customer service centre to be owned by the government but outsourced to Blizzard.
Say “no hao! To your local candidate”
Labor is also investigating using a “guild” to advertise its electoral message on several servers with high Australian populations. Its thought that several high ranking Labor officials have accounts in the online game. Wayne Swann, is understood to have a female night elf hunter. Julia Gilliard is also believed to have a night elf rogue.
World of Warcraft is the worlds top ranking multiplayer online game and has a virtual population almost half the size of Australia, and senior Labor advisers believe that the methods used by so called Gold Farmers could be used to further spread the Opposition message. This appeals to Kevin Rudd, who is already fluent in Mandarin, and the party is keen to take advantage of this citing the massive numbers of people online at any time.
