WOW patch beset with problems

By Oli Welsh Published 22 January, 2009

Wintergrasp back up, Arenas gone.

The release of yesterday's WOW patch hasn't gone as smoothly as Blizzard would have hoped, with headline changes not working properly, major player-versus-player game features disabled, and bugs and lag apparently worse than before.

WOW Insider has listed some of the issues, judging the patch a "disaster".

As we reported yesterday, the Wintergrasp PVP zone had to be disabled after it was found to crash the game servers. No sooner was this fixed than Arena battles had to be removed due to bugs in the ranking system.

The unavailability of account-wide Death Knight creation servers - one of the main features of the patch - is being fixed through rolling sever restarts. Several other changes and fixes in the patch are simply not working as intended, and animation issues appear to be rife.

To be fair, we didn't encounter any problems beyond a little lag in a heroic instance run last night - and we fully expect most of the complaints to have subsided within the week. Nonetheless, the pressure of expectation on the first substantial patch since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion launched was great. It seems that Blizzard has fallen some way short of the quality standards expected of it this time.

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About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (9) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Chimpy #1 3 years ago

    Blizzard need to hire some better programmers.
    Edited by 2 at 22/01/09 @ 10:06

  • VicViper #2 3 years ago

    What a helpful comment, Given the scale of the game I would assume that play testing would be um promblematic, then again GTA IV is a big game and its not a buggy mess. Well unless the DLC sorts that out.
    Edited by 1 at 22/01/09 @ 10:22

  • IronCladChicken #3 3 years ago

    Naa - They just screwed up; it was bound to happen at some point (and will no doubt happen again in the future) - maybe the patch process isn’t properly formalised/followed, maybe they should release more frequent, smaller patches, maybe they need to replace their QA team asap - But whatever it is, hopefully Blizzard will identify the problem and make changes instead of making excuses and living in denial.

  • Hive #4 3 years ago

    There were loads of really annoying bugs introduced with the patch but it seems a few hours later they'd already been hotfixed.

  • Destrin #5 3 years ago

    Post deleted at 12:47:09 13-12-2011

  • VicViper #6 3 years ago

    @Destrin

    Really? I guess I could say the same, I had not crashes and nothing that was really game breaking, My ritual of summoining (no summoning stone created) is broken however but that was about it

  • RamblinSydRumpo #7 3 years ago

    Had zero problems also. The much touted Hunter nerf also didn't seem to have made a huge difference.

  • RedSparrows #8 3 years ago

    'We' can stand for EG because the opinion of each member collates to form the outlet that is EG as a whole, so 'we' is alright.

  • dingo75 #9 3 years ago

    We noticed or felt to notice a stealth nerf with Grobbulus 10 man in Naxx. The poison clouds damage ticks have been reduced a lot according to our healers. We had a non-guildie mage with us and he had no clue where to "blow" up. He always ran to the tank. Of course he got the debuff like 6 times. Yet we managed to kill the boss without any death. The mage died looting the boss in a cloud...
    Seem Naxx is further trivialized because that was the hardest boss pre-patch (hard is relative).

    Concerning hunter nerf:
    At Patchwerk I was 2nd in damage with a blue + badge gear (not T7) warlock after a rogue. Boomkin came in 3rd.
    Hunter in full epic barely fought off the noob mage and stayed in 4th so to me this was a "good" nerf. Pitty those hunters.
    I did UK Heroic before Naxx and was top dps with a DK closely behind. We did the 2 bosses that have to die close to each other without the hunter who was afk eating... No problems at all.

  • wowgoldpaladin #10 3 years ago

    How can they let something this borked out of the gates? I just can't imagine how underpaid their testers are. You have animation bugs, crashing maps, lowered wow gold for old world bosses, death knight bugs - the works.

    Get with the program, Blizz!