Summary
- World of Warcraft players in specific regions will receive an extra day of game time after Patch 11.0 maintenance.
- The compensation follows a 14-hour maintenance period that prevented players in certain hemispheres from logging in.
- Blizzard has acknowledged issues with new features like cross-realm trading and the Warband Bank in the pre-expansion content.
Following the launch of Patch 11.0, which required around 14 hours of maintenance, World of Warcraft announced that players in some regions would receive an additional day of game time as compensation. World of Warcraft players in North America, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand will see the added day of game time tacked on in the coming weeks.
Patch 11.0 is the pre-expansion content update for World of Warcraft: The War Within, the game's tenth expansion. In addition to a new World of Warcraft login screen and features such as Hero Talents, The War Within also brought some major changes to account-wide systems. The new Warbands feature allows players to keep track of their favorite classes and trade various items such as currencies, weapons, and armor between them on the same Battle.net account. However, the pre-expansion content update was not without its flaws, as the game was in maintenance for approximately 14 hours on July 23, and players in the Western and Southern Hemispheres were unable to log in during that time.
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In response to the long downtime associated with The War Within's pre-expansion content update, Blizzard chose to give some players a break. According to Blizzard, World of Warcraft players in North America, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand would receive one additional day of game time if their subscription was active on July 23. The added day is expected to be added to players' accounts around August 15. Blizzard said that players can check their Battle.net accounts to see how much game time they currently have, and asked for players' patience as the development team worked to address some outstanding issues with the game.
Some World of Warcraft Players Will Get One Day of Free Game Time
- World of Warcraft players in North America, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand will get one free day of game time.
- The game time is considered compensation for lengthy server maintenance that took place on July 23.
- The maintenance rendered players in the Western and Southern Hemispheres unable to play for the majority of the day.
- Blizzard stated that the bonus game time would be added around August 15.
At the time of writing, some features associated with The War Within were deactivated to address some critical errors. Cross-realm trading and the Warband Bank system were originally supposed to be part of Patch 11.0's release, but have not been functional as Blizzard worked out some bugs that came up during maintenance and in the hours that followed. Blizzard has not provided a timetable for when the Warband Bank and cross-realm trading features would return, but stated that the ongoing issues will be a top priority ahead of the expansion's August 26 global launch.
The move to compensate World of Warcraft players is not unheard of in the MMORPG genre, as Final Fantasy 14 gave its players free game time following the release of Dawntrail. Only time will tell when World of Warcraft's pre-expansion bugs will be fixed.
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