World of Warcraft: The War Within's pre-patch may have dug up the graves of deleted characters—including my ancient shaman with a hearthstone that killed me

World of Warcraft: The War Within is bringing a whole ton of neat changes to the game—changes like the Warband system, which have been packaged early into the expansion's pre-patch. There've been some slight glitches so far, like Warband banks being disabled, but it's otherwise a massive quality-of-life boost to the MMO.

When logging in for the first time, your existing characters will be converted to the new system—but seems to have had an unintended side effect. Characters might be coming back from the dead, clawing their way out of the deletion graveyard.

After a couple of player reports on the WoW subreddit and forums citing "characters I've never made before" jumpscaring players on their character selection lists, I decided to hop in myself. What do you know—a Shaman on a different server that I'm pretty sure I'd deleted was staring me straight in the face.

I only say "pretty sure", because the character name was accompanied by a list of random numbers—a forced placeholder for when the game needs you to rename your character. As per the Battle.net support page, this can happen for a couple of reasons. One of them is having a character with an account that's been inactive for more than two expansions—another is, you can intuit, deletion. A reinstated character may share a name with someone else on the same server, which is a no-go.

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For those not in the know, at the end of Legion, a giant sword was stabbed into Silithus. This completely changed the zone from its previous incarnation, which had an outpost called the Cenarion Hold that my hearthstone is currently set to.

While you can still go back and visit the zone (which I have a bunch of uncompleted quests in), the Cenarion Hold was several dozen feet above Silithus' current ground level. The game sent me to the correct point in Azeroth—it just wasn't there anymore, so I went splat.

As for the wider issue, two things could be happening, here:

Peoples' memories are just as bad as mine—it's easy to forget a character gathering dust on another server. There are some players swearing up and down that they deleted said characters years ago, but the human mind is a funny thing.
Deleted characters really have risen from the dead. World of Warcraft has been around for over two decades, and it'd be easy to forget characters from the deletion graveyard or, more concerningly, past hacks into a players' account.

I've reached out to Blizzard and I'll go ahead and edit this article if I get a response.

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.