Forever goes realmless: four rulesets replace realm selection

World of Warcraft: Forever drops traditional realms. At character creation, players instead pick a ruleset: Normal (PvP requires mutual consent), PvP, Roleplaying, or Hardcore, which arrives after launch. Blizzard describes each ruleset as functioning like its own large population rather than one giant shared realm — grouping, dungeons and raids stay within a single ruleset, and Horde and Alliance still can’t group together.

Collections and Legacy Points carry across rulesets, with Hardcore the exception: progress earned in Hardcore can move into other rulesets, but not the other way around. Every character also gets a two-part name, unique per region, so names like “Ana Forever” stay available even as the population scales up.

Why it matters: it removes the old low-population-realm problem without merging the whole game into one server, at the cost of being locked into a ruleset instead of a realm.

Tracked on everything we know.