World Of Warcraft Classic Announces Return Of Level 55 Death Knight Character Creation Restriction

Blizzard’s been dealing with a lot of malicious accounts in World of Warcraft lately. Yesterday, the dev team announced in a blue post that they’ve removed almost 120,000 malicious accounts from World of Warcraft’s ecosystem. That includes Wrath of the Lich King Classic and Classic era. What’s notable here is that this is on top of their general ban waves which already take out “tens of thousands of accounts” every week.

Also notable is one of the things that the team has decided to do in order to address this issue. It seems that many of these accounts can be blamed on the open character creation of the Death Knight in WoW Classic. For those unaware, Death Knight originally had a character creation restriction requiring players to have a level 55 character on their account. This was done away with (temporarily) with the launch of Wrath of the Lich King in classic in order to let players get rolling with very few barriers. The problem is that doing that made it easy for people to start exploiting (gold farming) in the game as soon as they were in.

To address this, Blizzard will be putting the level 55 restriction back in place with the next patch. They also remind players that as long as people are willing to spend money on gold, the bots and farmers will always come back.

Note: Activision Blizzard is still under investigation by the state of California for serious harassment charges. CEO Bobby Kotick is alleged to have known about such actions within his company – and performed some himself – and shielded the perpetrators from consequences.