Tobold sticking to his guns

In followup to yesterday's tussle with Tobold over what I see as highly flawed logic, Tobold posted a couple more comments to yesterday's post. According to Tobold there are no--zero--Chinese accounts right now due to the loss of license by the9, and the rumor that NetEase will not receive permission from the Chinese government to activate WoW until the Chinese courts have adjudicated lawsuits filed by the9. MMO-Champion just happened to run a timely post of their own yesterday that stated a Chinese guild had the world-first kill of Yogg+0 kill. Tongue in cheek, I posted that to his blog and his reply was:

So you think that Taiwan is an inseperable part of China? You communist!
;)

Again, this story is about millions of mainland Chinese players losing access
to their characters. The fact that they can make a NEW account and start over at
level 1 on a Taiwanese or even US server doesn't change anything. They can't
MOVE their existing characters.

I won't get wrapped up in the whole Taiwan/China bruh ha ha, but my point is that Chinese players that had been playing on Chinese servers had moved en masse to Taiwanese servers. There have been ample reports of this nature in the months leading up to Tobold's blog post yesterday so I do not agree with his logic here. It does matter because the premise of the blog post indicating that the WoW subscriber base was down to 5 million is based entirely on the loss of those Chinese accounts on Chinese servers. Once a Chinese player moves from a Chinese server to a Taiwanese server the net effect is 0. One loss to Chinese server, and one gain to Taiwanese server. 11,499,000 players at the loss, an 11,500,000 players at the gain.

An individual character has nothing to do with the discussion what so ever since we're speaking about the player base. An account is an account is an account, regardless of where it's hosted.