All NA WoW Accounts Getting Free Game Time

The pre-expansion update (or “pre-patch”) for World of Warcraft: The War Within launched earlier this week, and I’m disappointed to report that the update’s first few days have been a bit of a mess, to put it diplomatically. For starters, Blizzard originally estimated that WoW would be unplayable due to maintenance for a period of about 8 hours on patch day, from 7 AM to 3 PM PDT. However, that maintenance window was ultimately extended multiple times; WoW remained unplayable until about 8:45 PM PDT on the night of July 23rd, 2024. That’s the longest single-day maintenance period I’m personally aware of.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this went over quite poorly with much of WoW’s player base, judging by the amount of vitriol I’ve seen in the posts and comments on the official WoW forums since maintenance finally ended. The extra-long server maintenance and game downtime aren’t the only things for which Blizzard is currently facing ire from legions of its customers, though. Additionally, Warband Banks, one of the biggest features touted as part of this patch, have been unavailable since the update launched due to issues that remain unfixed at the time of writing.

Blizzard has now made a public statement acknowledging that World of Warcraft Patch 11.0 has gotten off to quite a rocky start, to say the least. Due to this, Blizzard will give one extra day of game time to all World of Warcraft accounts in North America, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand that had an active subscription as of July 23, 2024.

“We anticipate providing this compensation to affected players on or before August 15, 2024,” Blizzard said in that same statement. If this applies to you, you can head here to see if you’ve received your free day of game time.