World of Warcraft: Forever Launches November 5: Name Reservation, Rulesets and Week-One Prep

World of Warcraft: Forever Goes Live November 5 — Name Reservation, Rulesets and Your Week-One Checklist

The short version: Forever goes live November 5 at 07:00 Beijing time (November 4, 3:00 p.m. PST). If you already have WoW game time, you are in — the expansion itself is not a separate purchase. Only three things actually need your attention before then: the November 3 name reservation, locking in a ruleset and faction, and settling your profession and Legacy plan. Everything officially confirmed is collected below into a checklist you can work straight through.

Updated October 28, 2026. The Chinese-region beta ran October 6–26 and has been wiped — no test characters carry over.

A note on regions. The date table below uses Beijing time, because that is how the published announcements list them. The launch moment itself is global and simultaneous, which puts it on November 4 for North America and the UK. Some items — pre-purchase pricing, the CN beta window, the enforcement numbers — come from the Chinese-region announcements specifically. Where Blizzard has not published a separate regional figure, this guide says so rather than guessing.

1. Official timeline: eight days out, four dates that matter

When (Beijing time)	What	What you do
Oct 26	CN beta ends (wipe)	Test characters are gone; stop digging through old gear
Nov 3, 02:00	Name reservation opens	Set an alarm. Requires a pre-purchase pack
Before end of Nov 4	Name reservation window closes (sources differ — see below)	Do not leave this for the last night
Nov 5, 07:00	Global launch	Players with only game time start here
Dec 10	Raids open	A 10-player raid and Mount Hyjal (20-player)

In North American time: name reservation opens November 2 at 10:00 a.m. PST / 1:00 p.m. EST, and launch is November 4 at 3:00 p.m. PST / 6:00 p.m. EST (11:00 p.m. UK).

Four things people get wrong:

• The date is not the same everywhere. It is one global launch moment, but the local calendar date differs: NA and UK land on November 4, the Chinese realm on the morning of November 5. Do not mix the two when reading guides.

• The reservation end date is listed inconsistently. The pre-purchase page footnote says November 3–4; the October 22 announcement words it as running to November 5. Treat the conservative reading as correct — finish before the end of November 4, not on launch morning.

• Launch costs nothing extra, but the new race does not. The new playable race and its starting isle require the hero-tier pre-purchase (¥218, roughly $30) or above. Game-time-only players play normally; they just do not get that race or its intro storyline.

• The ¥388 epic tier only makes sense if you were renewing anyway. Over the ¥218 tier it adds beta access (now expired, worthless to you), 30 days of game time credited November 5, two extra mounts and transmog sets, four pets, two tabards, and friend-invite slots going from one to three.

Do the arithmetic: if you were going to buy 30 days of game time regardless, that alone covers most of the gap and the epic tier is the better buy. If you only want the new race, the ¥218 tier is enough.

2. Name reservation: three slots, not three names — three locked decisions

This is the most misread part of the whole rollout. During reservation each account may create up to three characters, and the three slots are shared across every ruleset — take two on the PvP ruleset and you have one left between Normal and Roleplaying combined. The cap applies only during reservation and lifts at launch.

More importantly, the official wording is "create and reserve," not "submit a name." You pick the ruleset on the spot, and on a PvP ruleset you pick Horde or Alliance on the spot. Three slots means three decisions. Once submitted, they are locked; characters cannot be moved between rulesets.

The two-part name system takes most of the pressure off. Forever drops separate realms for a region-wide structure, and every character has a given name and a surname. Only the full combination has to be unique in the region — so if your first name is taken, a different surname saves it. Plenty of people can share a given name; one of them owns the full string. You can hide the surname on your own nameplate (Esc → Options → Nameplates → uncheck "My Second Name"), but chat and trade windows still show the full name. When you are trying to recognize someone in a city, read the trade window, not the floating text.

Do not test the naming rules. The beta saw a batch of enforcement on violating names — forced renames at the light end, revoked beta access at the heavy end. Splitting a bad word across given name and surname does not work; the check runs on the combined string.

Reservation in four steps (condensed from the official seven):

1. Update your GPU drivers; install and update the Battle.net desktop app.

1. Select World of Warcraft in the game list, open the "Game Version" dropdown above Play, choose World of Warcraft: Forever, install.

1. Launch, pick your ruleset, enter character creation.

1. Finish appearance, enter given name and surname, confirm. That is the reservation.

3. Rulesets: this decides who you play with for the next year

Forever has no traditional realms, only rulesets: Normal, PvP, and Roleplaying. The differences are hard rules, not preferences:

• Normal — combat only by mutual consent. The least friction day to day, and right for most people.

• PvP — forced combat is on. Faction is locked: make an Alliance character and you cannot make Horde on that ruleset. Blizzard will temporarily close new character creation for a faction when population gets lopsided. Pick this only if you want world PvP.

• Roleplaying — rules on naming and on chat. Choose it for immersion and community, accept that your name gets reviewed.

The Expert ruleset arrives some time after launch, not at launch. If hardcore is what you want, week one is not when you get it.

Order of operations: decide who you are playing with first, then pick the ruleset. There is no cross-realm play here, so a wrong pick does not cost you a server — it costs you a year's worth of teammates.

4. The campfire system: the one table worth memorizing before launch

Forever takes Cooking's campfire and promotes it to a Basic Campfire: drop one and it forms a shared camp where nearby players can rest, pick up buffs from other people's facilities, and move on.

Three mechanics to hold onto:

• Each basic campfire holds 3 player-crafted facilities, and each player contributes at most 1 — what a camp ends up offering depends entirely on which professions your group brought.

• To pick up someone else's facility buff you must sit or craft for at least 1 minute nearby.

• Facilities must be placed near the fire and have a 1-hour cooldown. The first one comes at 20 skill via the starting-zone quest or a trainer; anything above 140 drops as a recipe from dungeons and raids.

The eleven profession facilities as published (values scale with character level):

Profession	Facility	Skill	Effect	Conflict
Cooking	Basic Campfire	1	Lights the fire; holds 3 more facilities	—
First Aid	First Aid Kit	20	Stamina +3~56	Does not stack with Power Word: Fortitude
Fishing	Fish Tank	20	All stats +8%	Does not stack with Blessing of Kings
Alchemy	Mana Well	20	Restores 10~29 mana per 5 sec	Does not stack with Blessing of Wisdom
Blacksmithing	Whetstone	20	Strength +6~34	Mutually exclusive with Strength of Earth Totem
Enchanting	Enchanted Lute	20	Armor +28260, all stats +013, all resistances +0~22	Does not stack with Mark of the Wild
Engineering	Reagent Robot	20	Sells you materials	—
Herbalism	Incense Candle	20	Intellect +2~25	Does not stack with Arcane Intellect
Leatherworking	Camp Tent	20	+5% rested experience at level	No effect if a higher value is active
Skinning	Camp Chair	20	+2% spell and attack crit	Does not stack with Moonkin Aura
Tailoring	Faction Banner	20	Same-faction Spirit +14~32	Mutually exclusive with Divine Spirit

Two rules worth knowing: all three secondary professions (Cooking, Fishing, First Aid) can be learned, but only two primary professions. Cooks can also learn advanced campfires, raising one camp's capacity to 5 and eventually 10 facilities.

So the question to ask before forming a group is not "what level are you," it is "what profession are you bringing." Five players overlapping on professions means the camp never gets its full buff set; Cooking + Alchemy + Enchanting turns a campfire into half a supply depot.

5. The Legacy system: why alt order matters in week one

The design intent is plain — stop making progression a vertical grind and make post-cap progress horizontal instead: gear, talents, systems. Three Legacy talent trees ship at launch, covering professions, adventure and prosperity (localized names may still shift). Legacy points are shared across every character on the account.

What that means concretely for the first week:

• Your first character should be the one with the steadiest output (gathering or crafting), because profession progress feeds an account-level benefit and compounds the earlier it starts.

• Do not treat character one as a throwaway. A 60 cap and a slower pace make the sunk cost of rerolling much higher than on retail.

• Shared Legacy points mean alts do not start from zero — but only once your main has actually banked the points.

6. Where week-one gold goes: the real demand curve in Forever

The mechanics first, otherwise the gold demand looks like hand-waving.

Forever has no flying mounts and no level scaling. The cap is 60, travel is ground-only, the world is not compressed, quests run to well over a thousand, and gathering nodes are spread across whole continents. The consequences:

• Your first mount and riding training are fixed costs, not optional. Without them, walking eats your leveling speed.

• Profession materials spike hardest in week one. Everyone is leveling professions — the first campfire facility lands at 20 skill, everything past 140 needs dungeon and raid recipes — while gatherers have not yet blanketed the map. Material prices sit at their yearly high.

• Repairs, bag and bank space, consumables, and auction house float are recurring, not one-time.

• Gear fillers below 60: with no level scaling, the power gap between quest rewards and drops is wider than on retail. One or two blue pieces in the middle saves a lot of hours.

Week-one gold, in other words, is not a rich player's toy — it is a hedge against time cost. It is also why third-party gold demand spikes at every fresh WoW launch: not because players got lazy, but because a new economy's curve is genuinely steep.

If you would rather spend the first week playing than farming, PVPBank's WoW Forever Gold both stock it. Both are independent third-party marketplaces, unaffiliated with Blizzard Entertainment; weigh the account risk yourself before ordering.

The risk, stated up front

Forever's stance on real-money trading is the strictest in the game's history:

• In the September beta stream, Blizzard stated plainly that gold trading involving real money, and organizing or taking part in gold-settled raid bid runs (GDKP), result in a permanent ban when confirmed. The official wording was "severe and irreversible."

• The Chinese region published a violation-handling notice on October 9: abnormal summoning (warlock summons for gold) draws 7 days or more, multiboxing 3 days or more, and advertising boosting or cash trades in world chat draws a straight mute. The notice says the same penalty scheme carries into live.

• First enforcement wave landed October 15: for exploiting a Scarlet Monastery gold bug, 618 accounts took 7-day bans and 272 took 14-day bans.

• Over 2,100 gold-buying accounts were banned during beta, alongside roughly 1,600 accounts for selling gold or botting. Blizzard also mentioned a risk warning coming to the trade interface, prompting players to confirm where gold came from.

• Ordinary players get pulled in too: receiving or forwarding gold for strangers, accepting large unexplained mail, or splitting transfers across multiple accounts can all read as participation in an RMT chain.

If you do use a third party for part of your gold, treat these as hard limits:

1. Small amounts, spread out. One large incoming transfer is the pattern most likely to trip automated review.

1. Use normal in-game trade or mail. Never hand over your password. Anything asking you to log into a "top-up page" or supply a verification code is phishing.

1. Do not receive, forward, or intermediate — not even for someone who says it is a friend's account.

1. Stay away from GDKP. In Forever this is explicitly on the permanent-ban list.

1. Treat it as acceleration, not as the game. The quests, professions and dungeons on your main still have to be done.

7. Three things to do this week

1. Reserve on November 3 at 02:00 Beijing time (November 2, 10:00 a.m. PST). The three slots are shared across rulesets and the flow makes you commit to ruleset and faction on the spot, so decide before you sit down. To be safe, prepare two given-name + surname combinations.

1. Settle professions before launch. Two primaries, all three secondaries. Make sure your group has Cooking (the fire itself) plus at least one strong buff profession — Enchanted Lute, Whetstone or Faction Banner. Three facilities per fire, one per person: overlap is wasted.

1. Make your first character a producer, not a showpiece. Legacy points are account-wide; your first character's progress sets the starting line for every alt after it.

FAQ

Can I play Forever without buying a pack? Yes. Once it is live, active WoW game time is all you need — the expansion is not a separate purchase. What you miss is the new race, its starting-zone storyline, and the pack cosmetics. You also lose name reservation eligibility, meaning you create your character on launch day like everyone else.

I did not get the name I wanted. Now what? Use the surname. Given names can repeat — only the full combination is unique in the region, so a different surname frees it up. You can hide the surname on your nameplate so only the given name shows overhead.

Does anything carry over from beta? No. The Chinese-region beta ran October 6–26 as a wipe test, and all test characters and data were deleted afterward.

How is Forever different from Classic and the seasonal realms? Three parallel product lines, not one. Forever caps at 60 and expands horizontally as a long-term standalone: no flying mounts, no level scaling, 27 rebuilt talent trees (plus a 16th keystone point), over a thousand new quests, nine new dungeons, account-wide Legacy progression, the campfire system, and a full lighting and visual upgrade.

How much raiding is there at launch? December 10 opens a 10-player raid and Mount Hyjal at 20-player; the reworked 40-player Onyxia's Lair follows after that.

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World of Warcraft and all game names, races, professions and systems referenced here are trademarks or copyrighted content of Blizzard Entertainment, used for identification only. This article contains paid product links; the products listed are sold by PVPBank as independent third parties and are not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment or NetEase. Trading in-game virtual items for real money may violate the game's terms of service and result in account penalties — judge the risk yourself. All dates and values are as published in official announcements.