World of Warcraft: Forever has no realms. Everybody shares one world, and instead of picking a server you pick a ruleset. Blizzard announced four at the BlizzCon Deep Dive panel on 13 September 2026, and three of them are available when the game launches on 4 November.
This is the single decision in Forever that you cannot undo, and the reason is one line from that panel: “Cross-ruleset grouping is not supported.”
You can party, run dungeons and raid only with people who chose the same ruleset as you. Not “it is awkward”, not “there is a queue penalty” — you cannot group at all.
It is worth sitting with how much heavier that is than a realm. On a normal WoW version, a friend on the wrong server is an inconvenience with a price tag: pay for a transfer and the problem is gone. Forever has no transfer to buy, because there is no server to move between. If half your guild picks Normal and half picks PvP, you do not have a guild with a problem. You have two guilds.
So the order of operations for anybody forming or joining a guild is: agree the ruleset first, in writing, before a single character exists. Everything else — raid nights, loot rules, what you are progressing toward — can be renegotiated later. This cannot.
No. That is the whole of the answer, and it is worth stating on its own because it is the question most people actually have and the one most coverage of Forever’s servers does not answer. Blizzard’s line is that cross-ruleset grouping is not supported, so a friend on PvP and a friend on Normal cannot party, cannot run a dungeon together and cannot raid together.
The workaround is the ordinary one: make a second character on their ruleset. It is a much cheaper workaround than it used to be, because your collection and your Legacy Point progress are account-wide across rulesets — more on that below — but it is still a second character levelled from scratch, and a raiding guild cannot run on people doing that twice.
Described by Blizzard as “the baseline World of Warcraft experience with a focus on cooperation, where player-versus-player combat requires mutual consent”.
This is the default in the sense that it asks the least of you. It is not the PvP-free option — battlegrounds and duels are consensual PvP and consent is exactly what this ruleset is built around. It is the option where nobody interrupts your questing.
“For players who want every trip into contested territory to carry more danger, excitement, and world conflict.”
The trade a guild should think about here is not whether its members enjoy PvP. It is whether they enjoy PvP while trying to do something else — farming consumables the night before a raid, levelling an alt, running a dungeon on a schedule. Those are the hours world PvP actually interrupts, and a roster that answers differently on that question will feel the split long before it reaches a raid.
“For players who want to lean more deeply into the fantasy of Azeroth and seek out like-minded adventurers.”
Naming and behaviour rules apply. For a raiding guild the practical question is whether your recruitment pool is large enough on an RP ruleset — it is a smaller population by nature, and a 20-player roster needs a bench.
“Available after launch for players seeking the ultimate challenge, where every decision matters and death carries lasting consequences.”
Read that first clause carefully, because a lot of coverage has dropped it. Hardcore is not one of the options on 4 November. Blizzard has not given it a date. A guild recruiting today “for Forever Hardcore” is recruiting for a ruleset that will not exist on launch day, and its members will need somewhere to play in the meantime.
One detail that softens it: Blizzard confirmed that if a Hardcore character dies, it can transfer to another ruleset, including PvP. Progress does not flow back into Hardcore. So Hardcore is a one-way door outward rather than a total loss.
Forever’s Hardcore is not the same thing as WoW Classic Hardcore, which is a separate version with its own realms. They share a word and nothing else.
The restriction is on grouping, not on your account. Blizzard confirmed that “collections and Legacy Points remain account-wide across rulesets, with Hardcore as the exception”.
In practice that means an alt on a second ruleset is much less painful than a second realm used to be — your collection follows you, and so does Legacy Point progress. Blizzard also said each character can spend up to 16 points in their Legacy Trees at launch, from up to 65 earnable, with the surplus going toward cosmetic rewards.
Hardcore being the exception is consistent with the rest of its design: its ecosystem stays sealed, so nothing earned elsewhere makes it easier.
Three questions, in this order. They are deliberately about the guild rather than about the game, because the game side is one line — pick the one your people will still be playing in February.
Then write it down where a recruit can see it before they talk to you. That is most of what a recruitment listing is for: a stranger deciding whether you are even a possibility, before either of you spends time on the conversation.
Raidify’s guild finder treats ruleset the way it treats a realm on every other version — a hard filter, chosen first, because a guild you cannot group with is not a guild you can join. Pick Forever, pick your ruleset, and everything that does not match is gone. Raid style and raid times then rank what is left rather than hiding more of it.
If you run a guild, the same page is where you list it: create your guild, choose its ruleset once, and publish a listing that says what you are before anybody can log in. Applications arrive with the times a person can raid and their timezone, and the conversation moves to Discord from there.