Is Forever coming to Europe? An 11 October forum question, and the answers Blizzard gave later

On 11 October, a player on Blizzard’s European forums asked a simple question: is WoW Forever coming out on EU servers? The first reply came from another player with an MVP title, not from Blizzard staff. It said the beta tests were on US servers and that there would be regional servers when the game released in November. A later reply in the same thread, the fifth post, raised a different question: whether Forever would get an RP-PvP ruleset. None of the six posts in the thread, as captured for this article, came from Blizzard staff.

The answers came later, from Blizzard, on separate dates.

20 October: Europe’s reservation window

Blizzard’s name reservation article, published on 20 October, gave each region its own start time for Early Name Reservation, which is open to eligible players. Europe opens on 27 October at 18:00 CET, and North America the same day at 1:00 p.m. PDT. Korea and Taiwan follow on 28 October at 07:00 local time.

That schedule answers when Europe can reserve names. On its own, it says nothing about who can group with whom.

22 October: RP-PvP

On 22 October, Blizzard updated its ruleset article: the Roleplay-PvP ruleset now arrives with the launch on 4 November, and Blizzard said it plans to make it available for Early Name Reservation from 27 October. That answers the thread’s second question. The other rulesets are Normal, PvP and Roleplaying, with Hardcore to follow sometime after launch.

22 October: NA and EU at launch

The same day, on Blizzard’s official End of Beta Special episode of The WoW: Forever Podcast, the answer said that beyond the rulesets, the only hard lines are the regions themselves. A player in the EU region who chooses English, for example, is still in the EU region. Asked whether players in NA and Europe could play together, the answer was that this is not how it will work at launch. It would not say never, and it made no promise of a change.

If your group spans NA and EU

This is our suggestion, not an account guide: if you want to play together at launch, agree on one region first. Blizzard’s Deep Dive recap says full character names are unique per region, so the names you reserve belong to that region. We have not tested how accounts choose a region.

The podcast section paraphrases the 22 October recording. It is not a transcript.