Blizzard has confirmed that the issues created by the high traffic of players trying to play the latest World of Warcraft expansion Warlords of Draenor have been made worse by a DDoS attack on its servers.

“Europe was our first region to launch, and we encountered a few issues due to the sheer number of players attempting to enter Draenor from a single location,” the studio explained.

“We worked to add multiple new ways to access Draenor, and this helped ease some of the initial rush into the new expansion as players were able to access it from their capital cities, as well as from the shrines in Pandaria.

“While that solution helped a ton for our North American launch, we ran into a few other issues, including a distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in increased latency.”

Blizzard has temporarily reduced the maximum players allowed in each realm to help deal with the latency issues, which will result in longer queue times for those trying to connect. The studio is also working on other issues including instance server time outs, continent server issues and garrison server issues.

(via CVG)