by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

UPDATE: Bashiok has confirmed that you will not be able to log into characters that are higher than level 20 on veteran accounts.

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In our coverage of the the Patch 6.1 datamining over the weekend, we pointed out some strings that indicated a Starter Edition-like state referred to as “Veteran Edition.” Community Manager Bashiok has just hit the forums to elaborate on what those strings mean.

In short, it’s a flag where if you ever had a WoW license, you can log in to that license with the same restrictions as a Starter Edition of the game and play for free. You’ll always have the ability to unlock the rest of the game by stepping up to a full subscription.

It’s an interesting step, but it certainly lays to rest some of the wild speculation that’s been going on out there since the strings showed up.

Read Bashiok’s post below. We’ll keep you updated.

We’ve always had this kind of weird limitation where if you’ve never played WoW we let you play as much as you want, albeit in a very restricted Starter Edition account. However, if you have ever had a subscription–but don’t currently have one–we don’t even let you log in. In 6.1 we’ll effectively revert lapsed accounts into a Starter Edition “mode”, with all of the same restrictions. The one difference being that your sub-level 20 characters will be able to join a guild if any of your other characters are still in that guild.

The label for this mode internally is “Veteran”, and those are the strings that were datamined, but it’s unlikely to be a term we use to any great degree externally. It will simply be the default state for accounts that don’t currently have an active subscription.