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WOW patch beset with problems

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.