How Forever's four rulesets work

World of Warcraft: Forever drops the traditional realm-selection screen in favor of rulesets. Blizzard’s blog post lays out four: Normal (the baseline experience), PvP (open-world conflict, with each account restricted to one faction there), Roleplaying, and Hardcore, which arrives sometime after launch and carries lasting consequences on death.

Each ruleset is its own separate community: players can only group, run dungeons, or raid with others on the same ruleset. This post describes switching rulesets as creating a new character there rather than moving an existing one, which reads differently from the September 17 live Q&A’s wording that moving a character to another ruleset needs a character transfer; Blizzard hasn’t clarified the difference. The one transfer this post does spell out is for Hardcore: a character that dies there can transfer into another ruleset, including PvP. Horde and Alliance still can’t group together on any ruleset, and Collections and Legacy Points carry account-wide across rulesets, except that Hardcore progress flows out to other rulesets but not the reverse.

The post also confirms a new account-wide language-preference setting, under Options > Languages and Social, that has a 24-hour cooldown between changes.

Why it matters: choosing a ruleset is now the decision that used to belong to picking a realm, and for the PvP ruleset it locks in a faction too.