Puncraft: Reserve your WoW Classic puns ahead of launch

Hello! Gera here. I have been given the keys to RPS HQ while Alice takes her usual evening sabbatical into the Rock Paper Sensory Deprivation tank where she goes to ruminate on the day's news. In the meantime I am using my newfound power like anybody would, which is by making many tiny yet still perceptible changes to the RPS homepage. Hey, nice vertical border. Be a shame if it was MOVED 3MM TO THE LEFT.

All of this HTML hacking is making me yearn for the simpler days of yore. It was a time when websites were still built with HTML. A time before monetization. A time when our MMOs were vanilla - and that's how we liked it. The year was 2004. And thus, I bridge the introductory paragraph to the subsequent news item:

World of Warcraft Classic, a server option that recreates the game in its purest and uncut form as it was before the first Burning Crusade expansion, is launching August 27. And with sweet nostalgia just over the horizon, Blizzard is letting players reserve names for their characters ahead of time. Dibs on FearonGillen.

Fans of the vanilla edition of World of Warcraft will be able to reserve names for up to three characters starting August 12th and running up until August 26th at 3:00 p.m. PDT, Blizzard announced in a forum post.

Anyone with an active subscription for World of Warcraft or game time on their account will be able to make the reservations, and the developer has plans to release realm names and types around the same time. But there are a few things worth remembering before you do. It's worth noting that players will only be able to make characters from one selected faction if they go for a PvP server. However, once live you'll be able to add more characters to the account - a max of 10 characters per server, or 50 across all realms.

"There is no overlap regarding character limits with World of Warcraft," community manager Bornakk wrote, "so if you have 50 characters in Battle for Azeroth you can create 50 more characters in WoW Classic."

Until then you can check out the write up of Supreme Dude Christos Reid, who describes his experience with the game during its preview weekend.

He calls the playthrough “...like scanning my teenage bedroom to see if my stuff was still in the same place. And it is! I know where the Quillboar hang out, and why I need to kill a load of them, and I could probably draw you a map of Wailing Caverns from memory. Even if you’re not as familiar as I am, there’s enjoyment to be had from carefully going over quest details, stocking up on equipment, and heading out not knowing how long it’ll take or if you’ll be successful. There are no flying mounts — no mounts at all, for a good while, and definitely not in the demo’s level range. Just you, the open road, and a load of odd-looking mountains.”