I’ve been messing around in Darkshire for about 4 days now. There is a horde corpse on the ground and, no joke, his corpse has been laying there the entire time. When I put my cursor on the body it says "Corpse of (name of player) ".
How do you do this without your body either disappearing or turning into a pile of bones? Anyone know the secret?
Just thought it’d be cool to leave my corpse somewhere weird next time I wanna take a week off. 
Pretty sure it’s caused by either never releasing, or by never resurrecting.
Probably both, haven’t died in awhile and didn’t pay attention to see if my body was still there while running back to it.
I think it is also that they logged out while dead. Try it. Die somewhere, log onto a different character, and see if you are still there. 
This is why the forsaken are so important. Recycling.
That would only work if you were on the same shard. Busy zones may have lots of shards.
You should see the outside of orgrimmar AH on my server there’s dead body’s all over the place in front of it
You didn’t used to see that. I suspect they may have made a change.
there was a lock on the Aggramar server that would do this all the time in the BC days on the bank steps
pretty funny to consider how silly and ridiculous it was then, now dead bodies in the capital cities are just something to ignore
There was a ton of Worgen corpses in front of the Auction house building in WRA.
He even announced when he was going to do it.
There was a TON of alts there.
It’s caused by logging out of the game while dead.
For the longest time on Bleeding Hollow there was a dead naked cow weirdly stretched out on the Ironforge commons mailbox. Whoever owned the character would sign in every so often to make sure the cow corpse was still spawned in the world. Saw that guy on and off for multiple expansions.
Hordeside it used to be pretty common for characters (usually cows) to be drowned in the little pond on top of the main bluff in Thunder Bluff.
I use the report function to get these cleaned up. Normally takes a few days.
Years ago ‘corpse graffiti’ was a thing where people would make a string of alts with their names spelling out some thing rude and park them dead in the enemy faction’s city.
It’s a form of vandalism and the mods agree they need to be gone, but they dont know theyre there if nobody says anything.
On my healers, I often try to rez them, if they are the same faction.
They used to disappear periodically. Want to say w/ the Tuesday reset.
Releasing to the graveyard turns you into a skeleton 
just don’t release
Pretty sure the corpse becomes the bone zone when you resurrect, not when you release.
Releasing removes the nameplate over your head and makes it so corpse-based toys can’t be used on it.
Eventually, I think after more than a month when you log into that character they will be alive and in the grave yard. I did that once in vanilla. used to also just wait out feign death on my hunter till I actually died and then logged out. Always freaked out a guild member back then too. Have low level players try to res you when they came into the city.
You’re right. I’m used to just raiding/M+ where it acts differently lol.