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Your character in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands’ beta gets wiped this week

Blizzard explains it's doing this to fix an assortment of bugs that have occurred over the weeks

Blizzard is wiping every test character from World of Warcraft: Shadowlands’ beta this week. The MMO game’s community manager, Kaivax, reveals on a blog that the development team are doing this as many of the bug reports they’ve received over the weeks relate to “player-characters getting into a broken state due to changes in questlines or Covenant flow”. Once the beta resumes after the weekly update, Kaivax says testers will want to “copy or create new characters in order to resume testing”.

“Thereafter, on test realms you’ll find that Renown with all Covenants will be set back to its initial, week one state,” the community manager says. “Please note that there will be two options for template test characters: On the Maw and Oribos realms, you’ll find character copy and Level 50 templates for testing the initial experience.

“On the Torghast realm, there will be Level 60 character templates and vendors that support PvP, dungeon, and raid testing. This will skip the Shadowlands level-up content and put the test character right before their Covenant choice.”

A date for the character wipe hasn’t been locked in yet, but Kaivax explains that the team is hoping to take the beta realms offline and do maintenance, character wipes, and the build update late Wednesday morning PDT.

The WoW: Shadowlands release date is next month, so we’re not too far away now. If you’d like to do some more preparation, you can check out our World of Warcraft: Shadowlands changes guide.