World of Warcraft Allows you to Bring Back Deleted Toons

World of Warcraft.

When you’ve got a game like World of Warcraft, and by some happenstance you find you’re responsible for it, you’ve got two objectives at any given time: keep new players, bring back old ones.  If you look at what World of Warcraft has offered in its new expansions, you’ll find there’s generally content that’s designed to do one or the other: New level cap and end-game raids for the people still playing, new races/classes/zones for old fans who might have been drawn back.

Of course, there’s a problem faced by anyone who, after a long hiatus from WoW, decides to come back: if they’ve been gone for too long, it’s more than likely their characters have been deleted.  After all, characters take up space in the game, as well as names, so keeping all the characters on all the inactive accounts is simply unrealistic.  And boy, it can be a hard sell to ask players to start from scratch when they come back to find their level 80 toon has been wiped off the face of Azeroth… especially since jumping a character straight to 90 costs so much now.

Fortunately, Blizzard is prepared to do something about it, and they’re recently revealed a new “resurrection” system:  a way to bring characters back from the crypt after you’ve been away.  It’s a fairly simple system: if your deleted character was level 10 or under, they’re gone.  Goodbye.    If your character was between 10 and 29, then you need to get back and resurrecting within 90 days of deletion, otherwise they’re gone for good.  Between 30 and 49, your deadline is within 120 days.  But when your character hits 50, then they can be resurrected any time.  The exception of the rule is the Death Knight: you have to hit 56 with a death knight to be brought back anytime, which isn’t actually all that hard because you start at level 55 so.

Of course, if your character’s name is already being used, you’ll have to change it to something else.  Priorities and all.  Oh, and your character will get all their items back too, to boot.

It’s a pretty nice deal… enough to make me tentatively interested in WoW again… maybe… curses, no, must resist!