The fantasy MMO World of Warcraft will be unavailable on Saturday morning for 6 hours due to maintenance work.
The launch of Warlords of Draenor is also proving to be an exceptional situation even for the veterans at Blizzard. After maintenance was scheduled in Europe on Friday morning from 7 to 9 AM (it was actually planned until 11 AM), further maintenance is now expected to bring solutions or at least get closer to them. The servers are expected to be down from 5 AM on Saturday, November 15th, until 11 AM.
Currently, they are trying to alleviate the massive lag issues by reducing server capacity. This has led to long queues on the busiest servers (Our title image shows Blackrock at 11:45 PM on Friday … and that’s not the end of the queue). Although Blizzard offers a server transfer for the fullest World of Warcraft servers, not everyone wants to take advantage of it.
Moreover, a hotfix was already applied on Friday that massively increases the number of mobs or quest items at bottleneck quests, or makes critical mobs “taggable” for everyone. Additionally, things like the toy train have been temporarily disabled, which proved to be quite annoying. Here are the hotfixes from November 14th.
According to a recent announcement from Blizzard, technicians are working on the following issues:
- The connection to the instance servers is unstable, which may lead to restricted access to the instances.
- There are problems with the continent servers that lead to disconnections and issues with player searches.
- There are problems with the garrison servers that lead to phase errors and performance drops.
Here is the tweet announcing the maintenance:
Planned maintenance will begin at 05:00 CET and is expected to be completed by around 11:00 CET. #maint
— Blizzard CS EU DE (@BlizzardCSEU_DE) November 14, 2014
Meanwhile, fan complaints have taken on bizarre forms; while a petition has been opened in the USA to gather 100,000 signatures for the US government to address Blizzard’s server problems, German fans have started a similar campaign. Their goal: to get consumer protection agencies to pay attention to the issues with World of Warcraft.
