WoW Forever Server Status: Live Since 4 November

WoW Forever has been live in all 4 regions since 4 November at 3:00 PM PST, which is 23:00 UTC. To check a server yourself, use the status checks below.

On launch day the game was in maintenance from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM PST, which is 18:00 to 23:00 UTC, as Blizzard's notice in the Battle.net app set it. The realms opened for play the moment it ended. Launch night started with login queues, and by later that evening they moved steadily. How the queues work is in the queues section.

Name reservation opened on 27 October and closed before launch. It held up to 3 characters in total across all rulesets and came with the Skyborne Heroic Pack, the Skyborne Epic Pack and the Warcraft Forever Collection. Since the realms opened, every name nobody reserved is open to all players. Every name rule is in the name reservation guide.

On 27 October Blizzard found a bug that refused some fair names, such as names containing “con”. Blizzard set the fix for the next realm restart in each region, so a refused name could be tried again. The same day Blizzard flagged a bug for Oceanic players on Australian servers. Its advice was to create Roleplaying or Roleplay-PvP characters before any Normal or PvP character. Otherwise both roleplay rulesets closed to later characters.

All regions opened at the same moment: the afternoon and evening of 4 November in the Americas, midnight in central Europe and the morning of 5 November in Asia and Oceania. US clocks fell back on 1 November, so launch day ran on PST. Europe moved to winter time on 25 October.

To install, update your drivers, open the Battle.net app, pick Forever in the Game Version menu and press Install. Access comes with a World of Warcraft subscription or Game Time. The full launch calendar is in the release date guide.

Forever has no realm list. At character creation you pick a ruleset, and each ruleset is 1 broad world for every player who chose it. Blizzard built it this way so nobody has to guess which launch realm will stay busy.

Ruleset	How it plays	Opened
Normal	Quests and exploring, PvP when you choose it	4 Nov
PvP	Open world PvP, 1 faction per account	4 Nov
Roleplaying	In-character play	4 Nov
Roleplay-PvP	In-character play on PvP rules	4 Nov
Hardcore	Kept apart, even in battlegrounds	Sometime after launch

You group, run dungeons and raid with players on your own ruleset. Battlegrounds can mix rulesets, except Hardcore. Horde and Alliance stay apart, and characters cannot hop freely between rulesets, so pick yours before you create the character. Collections and Legacy Points are shared across rulesets, and nothing earned elsewhere flows into Hardcore.

Your 1st login asks for an Experience Preset before the ruleset screen. Classic starts with Standard Definition models and fewer modern interface features. Enhanced starts with High Definition models, quest markers, combined bags and transmog on. Blizzard suggests Enhanced if you are unsure, and every setting can change later in Options.

How to choose between the 4 is in the realmless guide.

Forever runs on high-capacity regional hardware and splits busy zones into world instances, often called layers. A layer is a full copy of the zone with its own share of players. The game places you by friends and familiar players, by language and by PvP balance.

For launch Blizzard worked on layering at 2 moments: arriving by boat or zeppelin after a loading screen, and large groups entering or leaving a capital city.

On 29 October Blizzard set out how layering works at launch. Joining a group no longer moves you on the spot. A refresh prompt appears instead, with a time window to accept it. Forced world refreshes are much rarer than in the 1st 2 weeks of the beta. Blizzard also tunes which zones share a layer, so a packed Durotar can sit apart from a quiet Orgrimmar on launch night. For large world PvP fights, the layering at the end of the beta is what went live.

Login queues on launch night

On 27 September Blizzard fixed a beta fault that was filling the login queue. At the Classic launch in 2019, Blizzard asked players on realms marked Full or High to move to new realms to avoid the longest queues. In Forever each ruleset is 1 broad world, and layering spreads the crowd across copies of each zone.

Launch night on 4 November opened with login queues, and Blizzard posted no queue length. Some players got through the queue to a ruleset screen that listed every ruleset as temporarily unavailable. Quitting the game and joining the queue again got them in. Later that evening the queues moved steadily and play ran smoothly.

Your route from level 1 is in the leveling guide, and the addons that load on day 1 are in the addons guide.

A booster can sit in the login queue for you, and queue time is on us. Book your 1 to 60 and the Pro takes it from there.

How to change layers

Invite a friend to a party, or accept their invite. Since launch, joining a group shows the refresh world prompt. Accept it out of combat within its time window, and the game moves you into their world instance.

1. Realm Status page. Blizzard’s Realm Status page on the World of Warcraft site lists each server as up or down. Pick your region at the top of the list.
2. Maintenance notices. Blizzard posts maintenance on its official WoW Forever boards and in the Battle.net app. On 15 October it gave 15 minutes of notice and took the beta down at 1:15 PM PDT for a new build. The launch-day maintenance in the Battle.net app ran on 4 November from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM PST.
3. The ruleset screen. While the servers are closed, the game lists each ruleset as unavailable. If all 4 rulesets show as temporarily unavailable while the realms are up, quit the game and queue again.

Error BLZ51901016

BLZ51901016 shows up when you are disconnected or the game is stuck retrieving the realm list. Blizzard links it to a connection issue or a PC below the system requirements. Its fix list, in order:

1. Check the system requirements.
2. Update your drivers and operating system.
3. Reset your user interface.
4. Reset your network devices.
5. On wireless or a slow line, optimize the connection.
6. Close every other application.

Every player on a ruleset shares 1 broad world, so each region’s players sit in 4 big pools until Hardcore opens. Inside a pool, your layer decides who you meet. Friends, language and PvP balance set that layer.

Set your language: press Escape, then Options, System, Languages and Social, and pick a Preferred Online Language. It covers the whole account and can change once every 24 hours.

The PvP ruleset allows 1 faction per account. To keep Horde and Alliance close, Blizzard can pause new characters for 1 faction for a while, as it did in Season of Discovery.

Launch week adds players. Invite-A-Friend codes from the upgrade editions give friends access from 4 to 11 November. Roleplayers who want PvP have their own Roleplay-PvP ruleset, which Blizzard announced on 22 October.

Blizzard published its own beta numbers on 30 October. The beta saw 8,862,354 characters created, 1,889,084 of them Skyborne, and 9,959,014 PvP kills. Oceanic players connect to Australian servers and can still group with friends in North America.

Your Pro levels the character on the ruleset and faction you pick, while you are at work or asleep. For the route that Pro follows and the hours it takes from level 1, read our guide to WoW Forever power leveling.