Blizzard does not want us to play WoW forever
I noticed the beta seems to have a 70 character limit and honestly I hope this is just a beta thing.
The official Vanilla servers already have a limit of 50 characters, and that already felt bad to me there. When they announced WoW Forever I was actually hoping stuff like this would finally be changed instead of just slightly increasing the number.
I'm not a raider. I don't really care about sitting at max level farming the same raid every week. The part of WoW I actually enjoy is leveling characters, with a bit of PvP here and there.
On the Vanilla Hardcore servers my casual "speedruns" to 60 are usually around 3-4 days /played. And that's without really abusing rested XP. Add rested experience, better routes and whatever people eventually figure out in WoW Forever and that number can probably go down quite a bit.
So if I keep doing that we're talking about roughly 210-280 days of actual playtime until the account is full, and potentially less if leveling becomes more efficient.
Obviously I'm not saying I'm going to play 280 days in a row like some kind of laboratory experiment.
But spread that over a few years (say 5-10) and suddenly it really doesn't sound that crazy anymore. Especially for something that's specifically supposed to be a permanent version of the game.
And I know the whole thing sounds completely insane but that's kind of the point.
Vanilla is basically about leveling characters. The journey is the game. You spend days with one character, level professions, collect stuff, survive stupid situations, get attached to the name and eventually you remember that character because of all the things that happened while leveling it.
And WoW Forever makes this even worse because there are different rulesets to play. PvE, PvP, RP, Hardcore and possibly new races introduced... I want to experience all of them. Different classes, different races, different factions, different ways of playing.
That's a lot of journeys.
And then after enough of those journeys the game basically says "alright that's enough, delete one".
What am I supposed to do then?
Look through all my level 60s and decide which one I care about the least?
"Sorry mate, I know we spent 80 hours together but I want to make another warrior."
It's actually kind of depressing when you think about it.
You spend all this time making characters because the leveling journey is supposedly the whole appeal, you experience all these different versions of the game, and eventually continuing to play that way means deleting the characters from your previous journeys.
At some point the character selection screen isn't a collection anymore, it's just a list of future victims.
And sure, I can buy another account. Then another one after that. Great. In ten years I'm paying six subscriptions because Blizzard couldn't give me more boxes on a menu. (yeah I know it also has to do with storage..)
Honestly I don't even think the solution has to be "give everyone 500 character slots".
They could do the opposite.
Start with 20 slots or whatever.
Once every available character slot on your account has a max level character, you permanently unlock one additional slot.
Fill that one too? You get another.
So someone who only keeps a handful of characters never ends up with hundreds of empty slots, but people who actually keep leveling characters for years can slowly expand their account forever.
It would basically turn character slots into a progression system.
You want character number 37?
Fine.
Prove you deserve him.
Raise the other 36 first.
And honestly, if leveling is supposed to be such a huge part of the game, lean into it.
Give us actual leveling ladders.
Solo. SSF. Groups. Hardcore. Class-specific.
Track 1-60 times officially and run occasional races or tournaments around it. Give us an option to disable rested XP and introduce challenges/hard modes.
Imagine logging in and seeing that someone beat your Warrior SSF time by 11 minutes.
Absolutely unacceptable.
Now I have to make another warrior.
Suddenly leveling has its own endgame.
And suddenly we need even more character slots.
I really hope this gets looked at before release because this is exactly the kind of thing that doesn't look like a problem on day one and then becomes increasingly stupid the longer the game actually survives.
If the whole idea is that this version is supposed to last for many years, the character limit should probably be designed with people actually playing it for years in mind.
I should not need to perform population control on my alts.
Posted Sep 22, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC