What time Forever goes live, and the European bedtime argument it started

World of Warcraft: Forever opens at one moment worldwide: 23:00 UTC on Wednesday 4 November. Blizzard's launch announcement gives "the exact time you can log in" like this:

If your zone isn't listed, count from 23:00 UTC. That includes New Zealand: the ANZ row is in Australian eastern time, and two hours ahead of it is noon.

In Central Europe, the date is the trap. Blizzard's headline says 4 November, but the moment there is the midnight between Wednesday and Thursday, so a reminder for the evening of the 5th is a day late.

Midnight or morning?

That midnight has become a joke on Reddit. "So Blizzard expects Europeans to start playing WoW Forever at midnight," tthousand wrote on 2 November, in a post marked as a meme. It asks for dinner, "a magnificent Bordeaux" and "a little Mozart" first, then a civilized hour to grind mobs, since "tomorrow morning" brings "duties to society". When we last read the counts, at about 20:07 UTC that day, it had 1,466 upvotes and 426 comments. A later check returned no counts, so those numbers are not current.

One of the top replies took the opposite side. "You know its better for us right?" Pink_Flash wrote, at 518 points in that same capture, proposing to sleep through launch night and "go for a 12 hour session in the morning".

That plan assumes a rough first night. It's one player's guess: Blizzard's announcement doesn't mention queues or server load, and we aren't predicting either.