No, really, Warbands are completely account-wide

World of Warcraft‘s upcoming expansion The War Within is adding a new feature called Warbands that helps to unify your characters’ progress and allows them to easily share currency and items among them, so of course you’ll want as many of your alts in your Warband as possible. If you’re wondering how to add your characters to a Warband, we have good news: your Warband is literally just a new way of saying “all my alts,” so all your characters across all your subscriptions in your Battle.net account — the only limitation is the region you play in — will already be in your Warband as soon as the feature goes live. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your first character, your newest Earthen toon, or a Death Knight from Mists of Pandaria that you’re undeleting, every single character on your account will automatically be in your Warband and able to contribute to its progress. You can’t add a character to your Warband, because they are already a part of it. All of them. No, seriously. All of them.

Patch 11.0.1 goes live today! Here’s what’s coming in The War Within pre-patch.

Part of the confusion regarding Warbands is likely due to the focus on the Diablo-style campfire presentation of four of your characters on your login screen. This aspect is purely cosmetic and has no bearing on the status of characters; while you may want to put your most-played characters on the screen for quicker launch and at-a-glance information, you could also put up a group of all Dwarves for aesthetic reasons or to simulate a new album cover. There is one limitation to the display and character selection, however: if you have multiple subscriptions under your Battle.net account only one can be logged into and displayed at a time (progress is still shared though).

Choosing which characters to display on the screen is a simple matter of designating up to four as your “favorite” via your Warband character list interface. For now, there’s only one background, and limited functionality as to how you want your campfire toons to display — enhanced features and new backgrounds are expected in the future.

When Warbands first go live in the expansion pre-patch there will be a slight delay the first time you login as the game converts your existing stable of toons into a Warband. Once that completes, however, you won’t have to worry about it and Warband management will be automatically handled via the gaming engine. All your alts are in your Warband. Please, trust us on this one.