What time do the World of Warcraft Classic servers go live? Release times, hype, and more

Bill Cooney

After being announced all the way back at BlizzCon 2017, World of Warcraft Classic is finally going live soon – here’s everything you need to know about when Classic kicks off.

Classic recreates WoW in the state it was in September of 2006, before the launch of The Burning Crusade expansion.

Max player level is capped at 60, all expansion content is absent, and all the gameplay mechanics of the original version have been exactly replicated.

When can we log into Classic?

When you can start playing Classic depends on where you live in the world, for the Americas, England and parts of Europe, the game goes live on Monday, August 26 – while in Eastern Europe, Asia and Australia, it will be August 27 when the game goes live.

Classic will be going live at the same time – 3 PM PT/6 PM ET for everyone though, so users not in the Americas may have to sacrifice some sleep to log on first thing (that’s not even considering the potentially massive queue times.)

This handy map from Blizzard shows when WoW Classic will go live depending on where you live.

What is there to do in WoW Classic?

For those that may not have been playing WoW over a decade ago, Classic will let players choose from the eight original races of World of Warcraft: Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes and Night Elves for the Alliance, and Orcs, Trolls, Tauren and Forsaken (AKA undead) for the Horde.

Players will also only be able to choose from the nine original WoW classes: druid, hunter, mage, paladin, priest, rogue, shaman, warlock and warrior.

Like it was back in the day, only Alliance players can become paladins, and only Horde players can become shamans in Classic.

WoW Classic promises to take players back to a simpler time.

How big will WoW Classic be?

The hype for Classic has been building for years, but some people, like popular streamer Chance ‘Sodapoppin’ Morris, don’t think the game will be very entertaining to watch on Twitch at first due to the long queue times – among other things.

Despite the potentially long queue times, there’s plenty of hype among the Blizzard faithful and Warcraft fans to be heading back to the future with the release of Classic.

Overwatch League caster and admitted WoW enthusiast Erik ‘DoA’ Lonnquist even posted a picture of one of the original server blades for WoW – which were sold off to fans after Blizzard upgraded.

“The ⁦Warcraft⁩ server blade in question is actually the server that I, my brother, and our friends all played on during the first few years of WoW,” DoA explained. “So many great memories flowed through these circuits!”

Plenty of people have been waiting a while to play WoW Classic, so long queue times or not, servers should be plenty active come August 26 or 27, depending on where you live.