From Ars:
"We’ve removed the previous 10- and 14-day trial time restrictions, and players who are interested in trying outWorld of Warcraft can now play the base game for free up to a maximum character level of 20, including draenei and blood elf characters—all they need is a Battle.net account and an Internet connection," Blizzard explained in a statement. If you ran through a previous 14-day trial, you can go back to your character and continue to play from the point you left the game if you’d like, but the level cap will be set at 20.
It’s basically trial mode minus the time cap. Those of you who played the trial before are aware that there are several restrictions to what you can do.
- A level cap of 20.
- A maximum of 10 gold.
- Trade skills are capped at 100 ranks.
- Unable to trade via the Auction House, mailbox, or player-to-player.
- In-game access to public chat channels unavailable. Players are limited to communicating using only say, party, or whisper.
- Characters will be unable to create or join guilds.
- Characters are not able to send whispers to other characters unless they have been added to the characters’ friends lists or have received a whisper from a character first.
- Characters will not be able to invite other players into a party.
- Characters will not be able to join parties with other characters above level 20.
- Voice chat disabled on Starter Edition accounts.
- Realms experiencing login queues will prioritize players who have full, paid accounts.
- Starter Edition accounts are not eligible for character transfers
- RealID features are disabled on all Starter Edition Accounts.
Some of these features are meant to protect players from some of the more undesirable activities in the game such as trade chat spam. Also, note that while you can’t create a party, it doesn’t mean you can’t be invited to one. The part of not being able to join a guild sucks though, but I guess with guild perks implemented it’s understandable.
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