Blizzard hit by backlash over World of Warcraft server problems

Massively multiplayer title World of Warcraft appears to have become a victim of its own success, with developer Blizzard forced to apologise as serious server problems continue to prevent many users from accessing the game.

As many as a quarter of the World of Warcraft servers for North America were reportedly down over the past weekend, following a day-long scheduled outage on Thursday which was meant to fix previous stability and overloading problems.

"Last Thursday they took down realm servers to 'fix' the problem," one angry player told GamesIndustry.biz. "I can say that this only made the game worse. Over the weekend the servers were crashing ever hour or so."

Many players also report being dropped out of games in progress - often wasting hours of time spent forming a party or accomplishing part of a quest - and long queues to actually join busy servers.

Now the developer has apologised to players for the problems, and promised to give a free 48-hour extension to their play time by way of compensation - but the issues remain largely unfixed.