WoW Burning Crusade Pre-Patch Launch Hits Major Snags with Boost Issues

Anyone who's played World of Warcraft for a while? They know better than to expect smooth launches.

The Burning Crusade pre-patch went live yesterday. Sort of. After a 24-hour maintenance window got stretched even longer, servers finally opened. But the problems didn't stop there.

Those $60 character boosts everyone was waiting for? Still broken. Name changes too. Blizzard disabled both features seven hours after launch, according to their official CS account on X.

Tom Ellis, senior game producer for WoW, has been the main voice keeping players informed. All through X posts. "West coast is still asleep but we were pretty close last night so I expect boost will be back in again by around lunch time," Ellis wrote. "Don't crucify me if we miss that though!"

He explained some boosts processed fine. Others got stuck. The team needs to sort out why.

Blizzard hasn't responded to media requests about the boost delays. Ellis's X account is the primary update source right now.

Server moves blindsided players too. Maladath, an Australian server, got moved to US data centres without proper warning. Ellis admitted this was a massive communication failure.

"Yes Maladath AU has moved to the US, this is insane because the coms telling you the realm is closing (it is down to a few hundred players at peak) was entirely missed which is a huge fail," he posted. The server was meant to be shut down. That information never reached players properly.

Free character transfers are coming later today. Players on Maladath get moves to either the PVE realm Dreamscythe or PVP realm Nightslayer. Character creation on Maladath? Disabled.

Some players report Nightslayer itself moved from Central to Pacific servers. Ping issues followed. These reports remain unconfirmed.

The community's frustrated. Mostly about how they're getting updates. Reddit threads are full of players asking why official blue posts from Blizzard are nowhere to be found. Why is one developer's personal X account the main information channel?

"Tom is crushing it. Nonstop communication this is the sh*t we wanna see" one player wrote on Reddit.

Another player summed up the problem: "I just wanna know why we getting more updates from this dudes Twitter than battle.net. I'm not making an X account and can't see sh*t cause I don't have one."

Players appreciate Ellis stepping up. But the underlying issue persists. Relying on one person's social media for critical game updates? Not exactly professional communication strategy.

The character boost situation stings particularly hard given the price point. Sixty quid for a boost that doesn't work. Players sitting there, ready to jump in, credit cards already charged. Then nothing.

Ellis seems determined to fix things. Whether the rest of Blizzard matches that energy remains unclear. For now, players wait. Again.

Classic WoW launch day experience, honestly.