Hardcore Is Confirmed for WoW Forever. It Is Not There on November 4.

Hardcore is in World of Warcraft: Forever. It is not in it on November 4. Blizzard's recap of the September 13 design panel says Hardcore "launches after release," and the dedicated Hardcore panel that afternoon added no date. Wowhead's writeup of that panel has it coming "soon" and nothing tighter. No window, no quarter, no patch number, from anyone.

That is the whole date story, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.

How Hardcore fits

Forever has no server list. You do not pick one. Instead you pick one of four rulesets at character creation: Normal (cooperation-focused, consensual PvP), PvP (contested territory carries danger), Roleplaying, and Hardcore. The ruleset decides who you play with. Blizzard's recap is flat about the boundaries: cross-ruleset grouping is not supported, Horde and Alliance still cannot group on any ruleset, and Hardcore is "a completely closed ecosystem."

Collections and Legacy points are account-wide across rulesets, except Hardcore, which stays separate.

The character creation card for Hardcore, captured from Blizzard's own broadcast, reads: "This challenging ruleset features permanent player character death. Dead characters may transfer to other rulesets to be resurrected." So a dead Hardcore character is not gone. It moves.

What the Hardcore panel actually said

Four things, and they are worth more than the missing date.

World refresh warnings. Blizzard's line: "when a world refresh happens, the game will actually warn you to get to a safe spot before refreshing the world around you." Unannounced refreshes have killed Classic Hardcore characters. This alone is the most useful sentence in the panel.

On death you can move the character to any non-Hardcore ruleset, "rather than being forced to go into PvE." The word any is new. The destination is your choice.

Legacy has Hardcore-specific challenges and perks. Blizzard described it as "similar to a rogue-like, where each death will have some bonuses account-wide." The team also said they are "very excited to see how the Legacy system works with PvP."

Mak'gora. "Teased as something that the team is working on and actively thinking about ways to make Mak'gora tournaments in the future." Thinking about. It is not a feature and I am not listing it as one.

Context, not news

Blizzard traced its official Hardcore support back through Season of Mastery and the community's Road to Ragnaros event, said the developers played the ruleset themselves, and said the numbers on the Hardcore community are what got the prototype approved.

The open question

When. The live Q&A on Thursday, September 17 at 10:00 a.m. PDT is the first place Blizzard could put a date on it. If you care about Hardcore, that is the question to submit in the forums beforehand.