Blame beta crashes on Unholy Blight
by Eliah Hecht 
Sep 6th 2008 at 4:00PM
The beta realms have been even less stable than normal this weekend, which is a bit inconvenient when everybody is trying to test Naxxramas. Apparently the cause of the crashes has been pinpointed, and it's the Death Knight spell Unholy Blight (specifically Rank 2). It seems that whenever that spell was used, it would bring down the world servers. Perhaps it was mistakenly coded to surround the world servers with a vile swarm of unholy insects, instead of the DK's target.
So the devs have hotfix-disabled it; you will still see it in your spellbook, but it will have no effect if you try to cast it. A worthwhile trade-off for the servers staying up for more than five minutes at a time, I'd say. The other ranks, including the level 80 rank 4 version, are still available. The Storm Peaks and Icecrown zones were also causing issues, and will not be able to be hotfixed, so we'll have to continue to do without them until the next patch.
Filed under: Bugs, Realm Status, Death Knight, Wrath of the Lich King
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Chris Sep 6th 2008 4:13PM
DDKDOS, ftw (distributed death knight denial of service...um, ftw)
niko Sep 6th 2008 7:14PM
GREAT comment. Kudos, I lol'd.
/lol
Chris W Sep 7th 2008 5:02PM
all "i want this spell" jokes belong to me!
Xetan Sep 6th 2008 4:41PM
fun fact #2 Premades are out officially on the correct realm
Matazuma Sep 6th 2008 5:54PM
Fun Fact#5 DK's can crash world servers
Cowbane Sep 6th 2008 7:13PM
Fun Fact #12 DKs are capable of destroying naxx with one spell
jurandr Sep 6th 2008 7:20PM
Interesting bug. I bet the DK's feel like they were nerfed, though, when they got rid of it.
Eternalpayn Sep 7th 2008 8:57AM
Nah, they have higher ranks of it that work.
Slarti Sep 6th 2008 8:18PM
Heh, funny to see that a self-triggering spell is actually able to crash the servers (take a look at wowhead's spell effects for this, the third effect triggers the spell itself again, which of course triggers the spell again, and again and again...until the server runs out of resources). Some content designer definitely has learned something about recursion from this error :o)
Smurk Sep 7th 2008 3:54AM
Working as intended.