As someone who was around during the early days of World of Warcraft, it’s constantly surprising the amount of stuff that players can do themselves in terms of services. If we deleted an item or character back in the day, we would have to ticket a Game Master in order to get things back. These days it’s a much slicker affair, with web-based tools letting players press a few buttons to reformulate things from the void. That is, until now – as soon Blizzard will be temporarily turning off the character restoration service.
It all comes down to systems. When World of Warcraft: The War Within launches, there’ll be a brand new warband feature which allows MMORPG players to share progress across characters. Swapping over between the way the game currently works to this new shared system looks to be a complicated process, so Blizzard is turning off the character restoration service while the transfer is performed.
“In order to prepare all characters for the transition to the new system, which will occur during the pre-expansion content update, we will temporarily be disabling character restoration,” a news post from Blizzard reads. “For those who would like to restore a previously deleted character, it is advised that you do so before the pre-expansion content update goes live. After the pre-expansion content update goes live, restoration of characters on your World of Warcraft account will be unavailable for a few weeks.”
This means that from the launch of the pre-expansion patch and for a few weeks after, it won’t be possible to use the existing web service to restore characters. Whether or not you’ll be able to message a Game Master to get your character back should an accident happen is yet to be seen, but going on past form for the company it’ll be worth a try.
There’s no launch date for the pre-expansion patch just yet but it appears that it will arrive sometime in July. If you’d like to read more about this temporary restriction, you can head over to the Blizzard site to get more details.
While you wait for the expansion, why not keep up to date with our guide to the WoW The War Within release date, or spruce up your game with our recommendations for the best WoW addons you can install.
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