How to Find the Age of Your World of Warcraft Character
During a content lull in Final Fantasy XIV, I temporarily reactivated my WoW subscription to try the new War Within expansion. I’ve had a long on-and-off relationship with this game, having first installed it sometime in undergrad after they added the free trial and taking multiple years-long breaks in between sessions. Nonetheless my two toons, a zombie pirate warlock and a werewolf druid, have pretty storied careers since they’re the only ones I ever play, and like most players I’ve developed something of an affinity for my little guys.
So it’s always bothered me that I can’t see their age or date of creation in any of the game’s many menus and stats pages. I wasn’t taking fervent notes or screenshots back in those days, and I didn’t post about my gaming habits on social media or have any surviving Skype records to go check, but I would like to know as I’ve probably played them longer than any other custom-created characters in my long gaming career. Multiple times throughout the years I’ve searched forum posts, reddit threads, or in-game chat to see if anyone knows a way to actually get this info. Today I wanted to cover several methods my sleuthing uncovered, why most of them didn’t work for me personally, and the foolproof way which I ultimately realized out of the blue.
For example’s sake, we’re going to use my two toons to showcase the various methods, including their downsides. Some of these won’t work depending on the situation, but they’re worth mentioning as they’re often easier than the alternate methods:
1. Check Your Level 10 Achievement.
This is the earliest achievement most characters will unlock, and you can view it right in your achievement tabs. If you hit Level 10 on the same day you created the character (not a very difficult task, any opening questline will get you there before the tutorial even ends), this is good enough to answer your question you lucky dog! In my case, I was satisfied to trust this date for my druid, as I was pretty sure I completed the worgen opening questline on my first day of play.
But this unfortunately didn’t help for my zombie warlock, the older of the two toons, who I only leveled to 2 on my first session, grew bored, and deinstalled the game for years afterwards. For him, this achievement popped in 2016, far later than I knew the character was created, and I couldn’t find any other achievements popped for the ~2012 era in which I knew I created the character. So alternate methods will need to be tried!
2. Check the Date of Your Battle.net Account Creation
If you (like me) created a Battle.net account to play World of Warcraft, you’re in luck! That date is findable by requesting a copy of your Battle.net data from Blizzard. WoW was their most popular game of its time and their first title that really exploded into the public zeitgeist, so I doubt I’m the only one who has the motive to use this method. Alternately, if you purchased a WoW expansion on the same date you started playing, you’ll be able to see its purchase date there too, likely corresponding to your first character.
Unfortunately, when I saw my account creation date was in 2016 and my internal username is ‘nick2’ I remembered an unfortunate circumstance for myself; I had forgotten about my older Battle.net account (with the zombie warlock) when Overwatch had come out, and had created a new account on which I played Overwatch, WoW Legion, Heroes of the Storm, and pretty much all my random Blizzard stuff. At some point I realized and asked support to port my zombie character over to my actually-populated account and delete the old one, which they sportingly did. But this means my expatriated pirate predates my account by many years!
3. Check Third Party Sites
There are websites that have been keeping track of WoW character data for a very long time, and you might get lucky and find one that was around back when you first created your character. WarcraftRealms worked for my druid, reinforcing the earlier conclusion that she first roamed Azeroth’s forests on July 12 2017, but once again my zombie predated their records. I was getting desperate by now; was there truly no way for me to find this character’s birthday? Was he doomed to forever sail the digital seas never knowing when his maiden voyage had begun?
4. Calculating Via Gold Earned Per Day
Well, here we are! After multiple fruitless attempts to find the answer over the years, I finally found something that gave me the answer without even needing to leave the in-game stats page. Navigate to your statistics and check your character’s ‘Total Gold Acquired’, followed by their ‘Average Gold Earned Per Day.’ You may realize that these two stats can give us the total number of days a character has existed by dividing the former by the latter. In my warlock’s case, I learned he was created 4,525 days before the date I did this math, which I then plugged into a date calculator to learn began on July 16, 2012! I double-checked the procedure on my druid and it once again produced the start date I expected, ensuring this process gives the right number.
(I want to address a concern my friend brought up when I explained my process, he warned that neither gold values are trustworthy because WoW frequently forgets, resets, or doesn’t update these two stats for seemingly random periods of time. Luckily, even if this is true it doesn’t affect the value of what we’re calculating. Those two numbers can be completely wrong, all that matters is that the game divides one by the # of days to get the other. We’re simply doing the opposite to find the unshown third value in the equation, so the ratio doesn’t actually care about the accuracy of the two gold values themselves.)
I couldn’t find anywhere online discussing this method for determining your character start date, though I did see many bemoaning the lack of an easy way to do so, so I hope this helps someone else who finds themselves in my pitiable position! Have an awesome day, and thank you for reading.