WoW: Mists of Pandaria Classic consumed up to 100% of RAM and locked players out — due to a Blizzard typo and other issues

World of Warcraft doesn’t always behave the way its creators intended.

Recently, players of World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria Classic began reporting a range of technical problems and oddities. Issues included memory leaks, character customization glitches, missing items, and more.

Producer Tom Ellis described what happened to WoW Classic:

“It was a really strange morning. If you logged into Classic MoP on the US realms that morning, you may have noticed… some odd behavior. In short, during our scheduled weekly maintenance we deployed a new client and new server-side code intended to fix several bugs. QA testing and sign-off for those changes happened days before deployment, and we prepared them to roll out automatically.

Somewhere along the way we managed to deploy the new client but not the corresponding server code. That resulted in a ‘protocol mismatch’ (imagine the two parts no longer speaking the same language—similar, but different enough to cause… confusion), and the client began reading meaningless data from the server. It did what it could, but the outcome was memory leaks, very unusual mixing of races and character customization options, and other strange malfunctions…”.

The list of World of Warcraft problems didn’t stop there. The producer also mentioned that, for a period, retail WoW and Classic lost connectivity with Battle.net, which caused login blocks.

Tom also shared another detail — a typo that added to the complications:

“We still can’t fully explain what it was, but by the time people investigated the situation, the game and services were acting like best friends again, as if nothing had happened. Also, character creation in Classic US was blocked again because of a typo. And — since it was one of those cursed Tuesdays when I took US Classic down for an emergency restart — I somehow failed to take the AU realms offline as well due to a missing ‘.’ in the filter.”

Source: iXBT.games