WoW Forever goes live at one moment worldwide: November 4, 3:00 pm PST

The date has been known since BlizzCon. The time is new, and it is the part that decides whether you are playing on launch day or the morning after.

World of Warcraft: Forever opens worldwide on November 4 at 3:00 pm PST. One moment, everywhere — no regional stagger, which is a change from how Classic launches usually run.

That time where you are

Region	When the servers open
US Pacific	4 November, 3:00 pm
US Eastern	4 November, 6:00 pm
Brazil	4 November, 8:00 pm
UK	4 November, 11:00 pm
Central Europe	5 November, 12:00 midnight
Eastern Europe	5 November, 1:00 am
Moscow	5 November, 2:00 am
Korea and Japan	5 November, 8:00 am
Sydney	5 November, 10:00 am

So if you are anywhere in continental Europe, launch is technically November 5 for you, and it lands overnight. Australia and east Asia get the friendliest slot of anyone: mid-morning on the 5th.

What to do before then

1. Install the client now. It has been downloadable for days. It is in the Game Version menu above the Play button in the Battle.net app, and we wrote up the route and the fix for a greyed-out Install button.

2. Reserve your name by November 3 if you can. Early Name Reservation closes the day before launch, and it needs one of the paid upgrades. Three characters total across every ruleset, and two bugs hit that window — including a restricted-name check that was wrongly refusing ordinary names, since fixed. If you were told a name was restricted and it should not have been, try it again.

3. Pick the ruleset before the name. Cross-ruleset grouping is off, so the ruleset decides who you can run dungeons and raids with. There are five now that Roleplay-PvP was added, and Hardcore arrives after launch rather than on the day.

4. Decide your race on the notes, not the tooltips. Blizzard published a final racial pass on October 26 that the shipping client has not caught up with yet.

One rule worth knowing before gold starts moving

Blizzard used the pre-launch week to close a round of actions against real-money gold trading, and to spell out a rule that will matter the moment boosting services appear:

Transfer gold directly between the two players involved. Some of the actioned accounts bought illicit gold and had the seller deliver it to a third player who was providing a service, such as a raid carry. Blizzard’s position is that gold arriving from an intermediary is extremely likely to be illicit, and the consequences land on both ends: account suspension, removal of the gold, and guilds that take carry payments through an intermediary risk having that gold removed.

If you sell carries, take payment from the person you are carrying. That is the whole rule.

What is still unanswered

• Whether launch-day queues are expected. Forever has no realm list, so the usual queue picture may not apply, and Blizzard has not described capacity handling.
• When Hardcore arrives. Announced as after launch, with no date.
• Whether the racial changes land in a launch-day build. They are not in the client we can read.

Our launch page carries the dates, the class pages and talent calculator are on the shipping client’s data, and the leveling guides go to 30 so far.