Character restoration is back in World of Warcraft

The ability to recover a deleted World of Warcraft character was disabled when The War Within pre-patch went live on July 23. This service has been unavailable for the last two months in order to iron out the wrinkles of the new Warbands feature. It has been pretty satisfying to see our top characters relaxing around a fire, not to mention the ability to farm reputation on alts and transfer currency wherever it’s needed most.

The behind-the-scenes coding and data management of this new system’s implementation sounds like a daunting task. We’re talking about a game that turns twenty years old this year, and if you told me that the 2004 World of Warcraft team were planning their databases for the possibility of double-digit expansions then I’ve got a bridge in the Thandol Valley to sell you. Disabling the ability for players to suddenly restore a deleted character in the midst of this migration seems prescient, especially in the midst of some of the impacts that we’ve seen as the old systems are merged and purged.

If you’ve been itching to resurrect a character for the last few weeks, the wait is over. This week it was announced that the ability to restore your characters has been reactivated. You can check to see if you have any eligible characters on the character selection screen, right next to the delete button. There are some restrictions — you can’t bring back characters below level 10, you can’t bring back characters below level 50 if it’s been more than a few months, and some other considerations like having your character’s name taken while it was in recoverable character limbo.

I had never investigated this feature before, but I was curious to see if any of my long-ago characters still lurked in the databases somewhere. Alas, I didn’t have anyone eligible — I know my very first character made it to Un’Goro Crater but I must have stopped playing him just before hitting level 50. The restoration service is free and checking to see if you’ve got any characters waiting to rejoin your Warband only takes one button push on your next login. Do you have any long-retired characters that you might call back into service for the Worldsoul Saga?