Those countries are often where the average wage is a fraction of that in the US or Europe. Who gives these piracy figures anyhow? If a software industry can't be supported, how come a software piracy monitoring industry can? I'm just saying it's not a B&W picture, this story wasn't about piracy, and piracy is rife in all of the world.
As for the figure of 100k, that was just during the first hour.

Piracy in Asia is overall larger than in the western world. There are several countries where nobody even bothers (or possibly could live on) selling legal software.

And I don't find the 100,000 that impressing. China holds what, a fifth of the whole world population? 100.000 is not even measurable in a country with a population of about 1,300,000,000. Well actually it is... it's 0.77 promille of the population.

guilds have their own chat channels, you can also set up any password protected chat channel you want, just as with battle.net. But seriously, this isn't encrypted secure chat or communication, it's a game, there are plenty of other ways to have secure comms.
Does anyone here have anything positive or insightful to say instead of spewing forth pseudo-political rhetoric?

Welcome China to WoW, here's hoping Blizzard/the9 can get the systems up and solid enough to cope with the load. WoW has laready taken a large percentage of the MMO market, if it does well in China everything up until know will look small in comparison.

What might be interesting to know would be how much control the Chinese government would want to have over what players "say" online. What if the game was used as a "meeting place" for dissidents to get together and strategize, exchange information, etc.? WoW could be a virtual Tianenmen Square (except for the tanks and the guns). Do guilds get their own "chat" channels? Otherwise, the most people that could get together and talk "privately" would be 5, I guess.

I thought people would be happy?

There's a lot of piracy happening in the US and in Europe and in... everywhere.
Nice to see that the only two comments so far seem to portray the ignorant view that China is full of 'commie thieves'.

There's a lot of piracy happening in China. I guess that's cut down a hell of a lot with a subscription model, so I'm surprised at its popularity.

So will the imperialist capitalist propaganda "auction-house" feature have fixed low prices for all items in WoW China? ;)

"man! what the hell! Nobody has this, but I can only price this at the vendor-trash price!"