We’re less than two months away from the official release of World of Warcraft Classic, and as such Blizzard has released new updates on the game’s state, especially with regards to its closed beta.
In a community post on the Blizzard Forums, community manager Kaivax has announced that after seven weeks and almost 17,000 bug reports, hundreds of which led to the verification of new and unique bugs, the World of Warcraft Classic closed beta test will officially end on July 12.
It’s been quite the seven weeks for both Blizzard and the closed beta testers, as World of Warcraft Classic has been building hype steadily these past few years. There has been some disappointment over the decision, as there are a number of people that still haven’t gotten around to experiencing Classic, Blizzard has noted that the closed beta did its job well enough for them to shift their focus away from it.
“We have now reached a stage where WoW Classic is in a good state for reconciling remaining issues, and we intend to shift our focus away from the closed beta, which will end on July 12,” Kaivax said in the post. “Internally, we’re working through the aforementioned bug fixes, testing the high-level zones such as Eastern Plaguelands, and doing our raid testing. We’ll make sure Ragnaros and Onyxia are ready to go.”
While you can officially hold off on waiting for whether you’ll be chosen in the remaining week of the beta, there is still some time to enjoy playing World of Warcraft Classic through the last remaining stress test from July 25 to July 26. These dates have been slightly moved since it was first announced. The stress test has a relatively easier barrier of entry than the closed beta, as it demands more players in order to stress the network servers.
During this final stress test, Blizzard will be rolling out their multi-region hardware in preparation of the worldwide release of World of Warcraft Classic, which is still set for August 27. Expect more invites to roll out for this event as Blizzard is planning this network stress test to be the biggest of them all, with various fixes and tweaks implemented in the game to test out their effectiveness.
For players who are in the closed beta, Blizzard is also planning a small in-game event to commemorate its end on July 12, so be sure to save the date and stick around to see what’s up.
In a separate post entirely, Blizzard has also announced that there will indeed be an Oceanic server for World of Warcraft Classic, available for players in Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. The servers will be hosted in Australia, and the names for the realms will be released before name reservations on August 13.
