The rules around creating Death Knights 're going back to the things they were in 2008.

Blizzard takes bigger steps to combat WOTLK Classic Gold's botting problem, including banning nearly 120,000 accounts and bringing back restrictions around who is able to create and play because of the game's popular Death Knight class.

In a post around the Wrath from the Lich King Classic forums, Blizzard announced it had banned near to 120,000 "malicious accounts" in the game's Wrath Classic and Classic Era servers. Blizzard notes the most recent ban is in addition to its usual ban waves, so it said often includes "tens of a large number of accounts each week."

This time, however, Blizzard is certainly going one step further. Back when Wrath from the Lich King originally launched in 2008, players were required to already have a level-55 character around the same server where they desired to create a Death Knight to do so. However, that wasn't the situation for Wrath Classic's launch, where Blizzard allowed every account to produce a single Death Knight character without any restrictions. That was because Blizzard attempted to allow players to experience with their friends and jump right into Wrath Classic with no need to spend a large number of hours leveling with the content in the base version of WoW.

But, as Garrosh Hellscream once said, "times change." Blizzard has become bringing back the initial restrictions around Death Knights alongside regional maintenance on March 21 to be able to fight bad actors.

"Allowing every account use of Death Knights--even when they did not satisfy the historic requirements--was important," Blizzard writes. "However, now the initial launch period has transpired, we no more wish to permit the unrestricted development of Death Knights on brand-new accounts. It's a tempting vector for malicious actors to make use of to get into the sport and start exploiting quickly."

The community's reaction to the news is a mixed bag. On one hand, players have been pointing out the fact the ability for brand new accounts with no existing level-55 characters to produce Death Knights could be abused by botters and "malicious accounts" since Blizzard first announced the move. The issue only has gotten worse with time, with multiple WoW content creators like MetaGoblin and WillIE documenting the problem over the past couple of months.

Players around the game's subreddit observe that banning the easy development of Death Knights will probably just push botters toward using the sport's paid character boost service, something that has always been another point of contention inside the WoW Classic community. In general, it appears as though players are pleased Blizzard takes action, but doubt the return of restrictions around Death Knights brings any lasting change. Blizzard itself admits within the post announcing the Death Knight restrictions that the battle against botting is a never-ending struggle, writing that "as long while there is a demand for gold along with other services that players are prepared to pay real cash for, these malicious actors could keep coming back."

Blizzard has largely been quiet on its plans for wotlk classic gold in 2023, just a few lines of code around the public test realm for WoW's current Dragonflight expansion does give some evidence that news on what's next, perhaps associated with official "hardcore" servers, might be coming soon.