Bornakk has just announced that they're currently rolling out a fix to our Midsummer woes that will reset all of the associated Midsummer quests. If you've been following along so far this holiday, it turned out that if you did all of your fire honoring/desecrating last year, you wouldn't be able to do it again this year. That meant you weren't able to get enough Burning Blossoms to purchase what you needed for the various achievements.

We expected a fix from the beginning, and we're all glad to see it happen. It didn't take them long to do it, and that's a huge plus. The more time we have to get the Flame Keeper/Warden achievements done, the better.

Bornakk hopped on to the forums to confirm the fears of many players who don't happen to have their World of Warcraft clients handy to tell them the same thing: some realms are going to be down for a while and Blizzard doesn't know when they're coming back up. According to Bornakk, they are experiencing "additional issues" with some realms as well as issues with the launcher being unable to update game clients. They currently have no estimate for the return of the realms, which do not appear on the game client's realm list, but will provide more details at around 2:30 3:30pm PDT. A complete list of affected realms after the jump.

[UPDATE: Nethaera reports that Blizzard "encountered a serious error" with the listed realms and are working towards a resolution. Unfortunately, there is still no estimate for when the realms will come back up and more details should be available at 5:30pm PDT. The situation has a small silver lining, however, as Blizzard is considering "appropriate compensation" for the additional downtime experienced by players on those realms. Stay tuned to WoW.com for further updates.]

[UPDATE 2: Nethaera updates her post to explain that the network improvements intended for all realms resulted in a connection error which has taken some time to identify and fix. While she notes that the connection error itself has for the most part been resolved (which is why some of the affected realms now show up on the realm list), the affected realms have yet to undergo the regular weekly maintenance and patching procedure. This means a much, much longer downtime than anticipated. Nethaera hopes to give further updates by 7:30pm PDT. Time to reroll, I guess.]

[UPDATE 3: Looks like they're doing a little more work tonight on all realms to address a few issues. More information in our post here.]

We noted an error earlier this evening which was causing the Lake Wintergrasp PvP zone to be reset prematurely. Since ending epic battles early is a bad thing, Blizzard has gone ahead and "shut off Wintergrasp" completely for the time being.

This change is affecting all realms.

There is no word when a fix will come through, but we're hopeful it will happen sometime soon. Disabling an entire part of the game is a big thing, and an error that usually is corrected quickly.

Some speculation points to the change in daily (now weekly) quests that just went in, however there is no evidence to support this.

We're getting tons of reports in of Wintergrasp behaving a bit oddly today, and I can confirm them to be true on my home server of Cenarion Circle. Wintergrasp battles are lasting, at most, 5-10 minutes with no more than 10 minutes between battles. Good for farming Marks of Honor, not so good for trying to kill Archavon and/or Emalon.

If this is how you try to lower the lag Wintergrasp causes on servers, I think the quote "ur doin it wrong" applies. In all seriousness, I'm kidding about that and this is obviously not working as intended. Considering the Mark and Honor gains people are getting from this, I wouldn't be surprised if we see some emergency maintenance and rollbacks soon. I wouldn't get too attached to your gains this afternoon.

There's some fun to be had out there with everyone's new Patron and Matron titles. And by fun I clearly mean instituting a level of confusion and raised eyebrows that only a transformative romp through the wilds of Storms Peaks can give you.

First, you want to get your title from Children's Week. And with the exception of School of Hard Knocks the title shouldn't be hard to get.

Secondly, display the title and fly out to Brunnhildar Village. You want to head towards the area where you change forms into a Hyldnir Frost Vrykul. You know, the big blue women.

As you form goes "poof," so will your title. If you were a man and are now a woman, you gain the Matron title. Don't you feel special now? Of course as soon as you fly out from the area and shapeshift automagically back to your original form, your title will change back as well.

There are reports in which people have experienced similar behavior being sheeped in PvP. Apparently all sheep are male? Who knows...

Have fun with this, but not too much fun.

WoW Insider had a chance to sit down today and talk with Karatechop, the man at the center of the cheating scandal that has been rocking World of Warcraft to its core.

We'll have the full interview up for you soon (later today hopefully, or tomorrow at the latest), however one thing we learned from the interview is that his account has been closed, permanently. While we cannot verify this with Blizzard directly, as there are privacy concerns that forbid them from talking about other people's accounts, we can verify that the account administrator who dealt with the closure is real, and that the template used in disseminating the account closure information is legitimate.

The account closure email was forwarded to us from Karatechop during the interview, and we are confident in its authenticity. You can see the full email after the break. We have his express permission to reproduce and report on the actions taken against his account.

The other thing to note is that despite claims on other websites, he is not an employee of Blizzard. There is no evidence to support such claims, and he made a point of telling us today that he is in no way affiliated with Blizzard Entertainment, which we believe.

The full account closure email, sans personally identifiable information, after the break!

We were all taken by surprise this afternoon when we heard the PTR has gone live for Patch 3.1.2, because we had little indication that it was going to have a public testing phase at all. It makes some sense looking at the content of the patch, because it seems they're trying to implement the Equipment Manager again, rather than waiting for the next full blown content patch. This patch also contains the new round of Argent Tournament mounts described a short while ago.

When full content patches hit the PTR, the developers generally do not allow premade characters to be created so it doesn't taint the data gathered from dungeon and raid testing. However, this PTR period doesn't have any content like that, so they are allowing premades. If you've been wondering how X or Y class plays at 80, this is a good chance to play around a little bit.

Update April 30th, 2009: Karatechop's account has been closed. Read the fully story here.

We first received a tip on a mysterious guild that was blowing through Ulduar's hardest achievements one after the other, all in one day, about a day or two ago. Their gear and raid experience stated very well that they were in no position to do any of those achievements, but we sort of shrugged and let it pass by. It was odd that these players were barely in Naxxramas gear, and their first recorded Kel'thuzad kill was only two weeks prior to their explosion of Ulduar achievements, but we initially ignored these reports because surely, nobody could be hacking the game. On top of that, the forum threads submitted to us all had so many posts deleted from them that they were completely incomprehensible. There was nothing solid about any of it.

Tips on it are still flooding our mailboxes today and a bit more information has surfaced, so let's look into it a little, shall we? The guild is The Marvel Family of US-Vek'nilash. The character Karatechop is the one that has attracted the most attention, and you'll see why in just a moment. If you look over his gear, it's not that bad, really. Epic tank gear, a lot of it from Naxxramas, so it's feasible that he could make some progress through Ulduar. It gets weird when you go to his Statistics and/or Achievements panels. Let's go to his statistics first.

Self: "Self, I wonder if there's any more in-game fixes for today."

Self: "I don't know Self, let me go look."

Self looks around.

Self: "Why look at that self, there is!"

It's not weird that I'm talking to myself in a disconnected third person voice, is it? Perhaps all these fixes are getting to my head.

The changes announced late last night are not as prevalent as other days, but are still important none the less. Some of the more interesting fixes for today include:

• The damage of XT-002 Deconstructor's Gravity Bomb ability has been reduced.
• The trash mobs before XT-002 Deconstructor have gone through additional changes that should make them a little easier to get through.
• The Rogue talent Savage Combat should now properly be removed after leaving an arena match.

The full list of changes after the break.

Another day, another round of fixes...

This daily list doesn't really seem to be getting any smaller. While some might call this patch "extremely buggy" or "unbalanced," I think the reason we're seeing all these small notes about the encounters is that Blizzard is being more transparent with their in-game updates. Three years ago there was not nearly as much public scrutiny on the launch of AQ40 as there is on the launch of Ulduar.

And being that we all clamor for more information in greater detail, I think what we're seeing is Blizzard meeting our needs in some ways.

Nonetheless, today's in game fixes after the break.

My favorite is a fix to Sethekk Halls (yes, you read that right): Killing Anzu in Sethekk Halls will properly save you to the instance.

A good note from the EU side of things today. There will be a minor bug patch to the client side of the game in the next few days. This patch will bring the game up to version 3.1.1a.

The only change that we're told about right now in 3.1.1a will be indicting on the Exorcism tooltip that it will not damage other players. Exorcism was changed in 3.1.1, leaving many PvP Paladins unhappy.

As for when exactly this small patch will drop, we're not told. I wouldn't be surprised to see it tomorrow morning, however.

Today is a Wednesday, and that means that there has to be some sort of Battle.Net authentication/login/game-version issue today. And guess what? There is!

There is a long thread in the support forums about it, and the only blue response so far is that Blizzard is aware of the problem and they're working on it. Many, if not all, Battle.Net users are seeing an error stating the client cannot validate the game version (even after they've patched to 3.1.1).

There is no known fix yet. We'll update this post when there is more information to report.

Update: According to Neth everything is working now.

There's been more in-game fixes, besides yesterday's patch 3.1.1 and the long list of bug fixes associated with it.

Some of the more interesting changes:

• The Yogg-Saron encounter has received the following changes: Guardians of Yogg-Saron in phase 1 and Immortal Guardians in phase 3 have had their health reduced by 15% in heroic mode, the Destabilization Matrix cast by Mimiron will now correctly hinder the casting speed of Crusher Tentacles in both normal and heroic modes.
• Players can no longer summon the Black Knight unless you are riding an Argent Warhorse.
• Critical strikes from the Hunter ability Explosive Shot should properly trigger Thrill of the Hunt again.
  

The full list of the additional changes after the break.

Tongiht Bornakk has released another long list of in-game fixes that has already been applied today. He notes that these changes might not become active until after the servers reset tomorrow from the maintenance, so we don't know for sure what's in and what's out yet. Some of these changes would affect Ulduar raids tonight if they are already live.

A few of the more notable changes include:

• All of the additional creatures spawned during the XT-002 Deconstructor encounter can now be snared in either difficulty.
• For the Hodir encounter, the damage from Champion of Hodir's Freezing Breath has been reduced, the haste effect from Starlight has been decreased, and the timer for the hard mode has been decreased.
• For the Thorim encounter, the Runic Colossus should stop channeling Runic Smash once engaged in combat, the Dark Rune Champion should no longer whirlwind after being disarmed, and the Runic Colossus should no longer melee when it charges.
• The buff players receive from Tenacity in Wintergrasp is now stronger.

The full list of today's changes, and previous changes, after the break.