Hello. Have a family member who used to play WoW in the vanilla days and I was considering seeing if he would resub and play with me since we’re… very far apart IRL now. Trouble is, he hasn’t played for nearly 20 years. Is it worth attempting to recover a BNet that old, or should I just tell him to make a new one? Decent chance he still has the email he used for the account, problem is he’s moved countries in the intervening years and lost access to whatever phone number would have been connected to it in '06 a long time ago.
Edit to add: he’s also currently going through a move from a country that isn’t the one he played WoW in to a third country, too.
Its certainly possible to recover always worth tryng its possible his account may have been hacked in the intermission if there was no authenticator if he can rember the security question but not the password all they need is game time.
If your family member used accurate (name-wise) information for the account, to recover the account if they can’t remember the credentials or the original email for the purposes of automated recovery methods, they’ll need both their current government issued ID card + utility bill or other official document showing where they now reside and the original ID or passport they had from the country they are coming from. Blizzard will need to tie both of those to the same person in order to restore the account and perform a manual region change (if necessary).
The TL;DR here is Blizzard needs an “identity trail” where the original and current IDs match up to what is expected. The only person that can request, and thus receive, a restoration is the original account creator, so this process will have to be done by that family member on their own.
You can take a look at the basics of changing your country/region in this support article.
Main question I have regarding that is if it’s okay for the passport to be current if he uses his passport? He’s a citizen of both the countries it could have been made in with current passports for both, but I’m not sure if he has the original DL because it depends which country it was made in. 3rd country he just moved to and doesn’t quite have a utility bill in hand yet, would documents from opening a bank account suffice or would he need to wait for a utility bill and/or statement? He hasn’t exchanged his DL for the new country’s yet, though might not be an issue if he still has access to the email it was made on (that’s a 50/50 depending on which of the two e-mail services he used during the time period the BNet was on).
The modern B.Net iteration post-dates Vanilla WoW, and so the process would involve linking it to an existing, or new, account anyway.
I’d say it’s absolutely worthwhile tracking down this old account, but as there needs to be a modern account to link to, they may as well start with that step.
Basically as long as he’s got at least one official document from the country of origin (his original location of residence when the account was made), a valid current ID or passport, and at least one document showing his current country of residence, Blizzard should be able to work with that. Main thing there is to have the same name on all of the documentation, going from oldest to current so Blizzard can establish that it’s the original creator requesting assistance. It’d be the same process if you lost access to your phone and/or email and needed to make any changes or to restore an account (even if you weren’t moving).
It’s the documentation that’s key. If it all lines up, he should be good. Might take a few days, but Blizzard is pretty good about that as it’s something they’re trained to help with.
This is one area Orlyia or Vrak would have the most up to date information on. An pre-Battle.net 2.0 account should be able to be transitioned to the modern system still, but the original email would almost certainly be required to do so. If a quick re-entry into the game is more important than immediate resolution of the account issue, then yes, starting a new modern Battle.net account and later migrating the old account into the new modern account would work. But the caveat there is that there would then be two WoW licenses on the account and that does add complications somewhat. Most of what is on the original account would transfer over via the account wide features, but not all things would transfer over and be able to be used on the new license.
The good news is if the documentation is in order (especially if they can answer the security question correctly), migrating the old account to the modern system shouldn’t be too difficult. It sounds complicated, but Blizzard’s support staff are pretty good at breaking things down into a step by step process for things like this.
Have tried digging through Google and having no luck finding information on the migration process - is there a URL to direct him to for it? Or should he just try to put his old account info into the modern interface, or write a ticket from the “can’t log in” page?
This support article is a good starting point for recovering an OG (pre-battle.net) account. Because this also needs a country of origin change, you’ll need the documentation I mentioned earler in this thread.
Unfortunately, because your friend missed the window of opportunity for easy web based transition, you’ll need to have customer support help you through the process as there doesn’t appear to be a front end to work with anymore.
Edit: Go ahead and have your friend make the can’t log in ticket as well. They’ll probably need to create a battle.net account in order to use the ticket system, but at the very least that gives them an avenue to getting back into the game even if the recovery process fails.
You can then have your friend post here in this thread or make a new thread describing the issue. The reason for the ticket is so the SFAs here can see the ticket in the queue by way of the ticket number being posted in this / a new thread. It acts as a guide beacon for the SFAs to expedite the process.
While true, they are not referring to transferring a license from one Battle Net account to another Battle Net account. This thread involves a license from before Battle Net accounts. As such, it will need an existing Battle Net account to attach to once it is recovered.