Summary

Following the launch of Patch 11.0, which required around 14 hours of maintenance,World of Warcraftannounced that players in some regions would receive an additional day of game time as compensation.World of Warcraftplayers 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 forWorld of Warcraft: The War Within, the game’s tenth expansion. In addition toa newWorld of Warcraftlogin screenand features such as Hero Talents,The War Withinalso 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.

World of Warcraft Tag Page Cover Art

In response to the long downtime associated withThe War Within’s pre-expansion content update, Blizzard chose to give some players a break.According to Blizzard,World of Warcraftplayers 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

At the time of writing, some features associated withThe War Withinwere deactivated to address some critical errors. Cross-realm trading andthe Warband Bank systemwere 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 compensateWorld of Warcraftplayers is not unheard of in the MMORPG genre, asFinal Fantasy 14gave its players free game timefollowing the release ofDawntrail. Only time will tell whenWorld of Warcraft’s pre-expansion bugs will be fixed.

World of Warcraft

WHERE TO PLAY

World of Warcraft is an incredibly successful MMORPG that has been going strong for almost two decades. It’s one of the highest-grossing franchises in history and is widely considered the most popular MMORPG ever made.