Pour one out for World of Warcraft characters who are still in the last place you logged out. They could be on a mountain in the Dragon Isles, standing in a spaceship on Argus, or neatly tucked away in the Lion’s Pride inn in Goldshire. No matter where they are, they don’t know you’re not planning on coming back. They’ll wait eternally for you to make your return, standing guard on your gear and your poorly chosen transmog from a decade ago. If you did want to check them out again, however, Blizzard has just announced a free weekend, which means you can log in to your abandoned WoW characters without a subscription.
It’s an extremely important time for World of Warcraft right now. The last expansion, Dragonflight, was hailed as a breather for the MMORPG after the extremely uneven Shadowlands chapter, but it lacked a big narrative push forward. That missing shove is coming in the ambitious Worldsoul Saga and its first part is coming soon, with the WoW The War Within release date getting ever closer. So you can understand that Blizzard is keen to get as many people on board as possible.
Many of us have World of Warcraft accounts that have long since lain fallow. There could be a million reasons why people stopped logging in – lack of time, a change in circumstances, a guild falling apart, or simply moving on with life. With the Welcome Back Weekend, Blizzard hopes to entice some players to return to the game who used to have subscriptions but have let them lapse.
Of course while it’s an important time for the game, it’s also been taking a bit of a beating in recent weeks. The pre-expansion patch has been hit by several issues which has caused in-game currency to disappear, has seen cross-realm trading get disabled, and eventually required game time compensation from Blizzard. Even the currently-running event hasn’t gone down entirely well with the community due to some hefty waits in-between boss kills.
A free weekend might just be the thing to turn sentiment around ahead of the next expansion’s launch, along with getting some older players back to Azeroth to see what’s changed in their absence. If you have a WoW account that used to have a subscription, you may be eligible to take part and log in to your old characters for free. The Welcome Back Weekend for World of Warcraft runs from Thursday, August 1 to Sunday, August 4 and you can see the full conditions and more details here.
If you need to spice up your UI when you log back in, check out our guide to the very best WoW addons you can install. Or you could go and take a look at our recommendations for the best single-player MMOs out there, for a taste of something else.
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