From The Shogun at the official Total War forums.
"So just a quick update on the patch. The patch is now with Activision for testing. This process needs to be thorough and may pick up on issues that need to be addressed (which is the whole purpose of testing and QA).
That said we expect to release the patch by the end of January at very the latest. This is obviously open to change depending on QA but we will inform you as soon as we have the green light to go.
A big thank you to every one for being so patience and we will continue to keep you up to date through the forums."
So basically I think we're much closer to the patch, bar *touch wood*, something going wrong in the QA process.
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