WoW Burning Crusade Pre-Patch Leaves Character Boosts Offline

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Longtime World of Warcraft players are used to bumpy launches, and the pre-patch for The Burning Crusade was no exception. After a much longer-than-expected maintenance period, it’s finally live. However, players can’t yet purchase character boosts, and some have reported their characters unexpectedly moved to different servers.

The promised level boosts – which cost $60 and instantly raise a character to level 58 – are still unavailable. Blizzard has temporarily disabled both character boosts and the ability to change character names, as reported seven hours ago on their official support account.

Since the initial announcement, the only information players have received has come from Tom Ellis, a senior producer for World of Warcraft, who has been sharing updates on X (formerly Twitter).

According to Ellis’s post on X, the West Coast team is just waking up, but they were almost back on track last night. They anticipate the system will be fully operational again around lunchtime, though they ask for understanding if it takes a little longer. Fixing this is their top priority; they were able to process some data successfully, but a few items got stuck and they’re working to resolve the issue.

Game Rant reached out to Blizzard for comment on the delay with the character boost, but did not receive a response following the pre-patch release.

I’ve been hearing a lot about changes happening with the game servers, and it’s a bit concerning! Apparently, they even moved the Australian server, Maladath, all the way to the US. Ellis said it was a planned move to keep the server running smoothly, so hopefully it’s for the best, but it’s still a big change for those of us playing from down under!

So, getting back to the topic, a major update: the Maladath AU server has been moved to the US. This is surprising because the announcements stating the server was closing—due to a very low player count, with only a few hundred active at peak times—were apparently missed. We apologize to anyone caught off guard; this information was supposed to be included in the pre-patch announcement.

Ellis announced that free character transfers will be available later today to both the Dreamscythe (PvE) and Nightslayer (PvP) realms. However, new characters can no longer be created on Maladath. There are also rumors that Nightslayer is being moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, and some players are noticing increased lag (higher ping).

Players have expressed frustration with the way updates are being communicated, noting a lack of official statements from Blizzard on Reddit. Despite this, they appreciate that someone within the company is at least providing some information to the community.

One Reddit user praised Tom’s performance, saying he’s doing exceptionally well and that his consistent communication is exactly what the team needs.

One player expressed frustration that they were getting more information about game updates from a developer’s Twitter feed than from Battle.net itself. They also mentioned they don’t want to create a Twitter account and are unable to see the updates shared there.

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2026-01-14 21:37