WoW Wrath Of Classic Is Making It Harder To Create Death Knights from cuipeng202's blog

Blizzard is taken bigger steps to combat World of Warcraft Classic's botting problem, including banning nearly 120,000 accounts and bringing back restrictions around that can create and play as being the game's popular Death Knight class.

In a post about the WOTLK Classic Gold forums, Blizzard announced it had banned all-around 120,000 "malicious accounts" from your game's Wrath Classic and Classic Era servers. Blizzard notes that the most recent ban is in addition to its usual ban waves, that this said often includes "tens of a huge number of accounts weekly."

This time, however, Blizzard will go one step further. Back when Wrath with the Lich King originally launched in 2008, players necessary to already have a level-55 character about the same server where they needed to create a Death Knight to do so. However, that wasn't true for Wrath Classic's launch, where Blizzard allowed every account to build a single Death Knight character without having restrictions. That was because Blizzard attempted to allow players to experiment with their friends and jump right into Wrath Classic without having to spend a large number of hours leveling over the content on the base version of WoW.

But, as Garrosh Hellscream once said, "times change." Blizzard is bringing back the initial restrictions around Death Knights alongside regional maintenance on March 21 so as to fight bad actors.

"Allowing every accounting entry to Death Knights--even whenever they did not match the historic requirements--was important," Blizzard writes. "However, now that this initial launch period has died, we will no longer wish to permit the unrestricted development of Death Knights on brand-new accounts. It's a tempting vector for malicious actors to work with to get into the overall game and start exploiting rapidly."

The community's reply to the news has become a mixed bag. On one hand, players were pointing out the fact that this ability for first-time accounts lacking the existing level-55 character to produce Death Knights could well be abused by botters and "malicious accounts" since Blizzard first announced the move. The issue only has gotten worse after some time, with multiple WoW content creators like MetaGoblin and WillIE documenting the challenge over the past several months.

Players within the game's subreddit be aware that banning the easy development of Death Knights may just push botters toward using the sport's paid character boost service, something that has for ages been another point of contention inside the WoW Classic community. In general, it feels like players are content that Blizzard is taken action, but doubt the return of restrictions around Death Knights will take any lasting change. Blizzard itself admits from the post announcing the Death Knight restrictions that this battle against botting is of a never-ending struggle, writing that "as long nevertheless there is a demand for gold and also other services that players are prepared to pay a real income for, these malicious actors could keep coming back."

Blizzard has largely been quiet on its plans for wotlk classic boosting in 2023, just a few lines of code for the public test realm for WoW's current Dragonflight expansion does give some evidence that news on what's next, perhaps relevant to official "hardcore" servers, might be coming soon.