Hello everyone. I am a senior developer at Blizzard working on the restoration of the "vanilla" (1.12.1) client.
For those of you who follow, this project, you may be aware that our beta is already open to a select few, and we're slowly, but surely, inviting people. Right now, as I understand it, the people who get added to the list to be admitted in waves, you need very few degrees of seperation from either a customer support agent/other employee working at Blizzard or be an "influencer" is the term they use. So for those of you who didn't get in, sorry.
To clarify: You will *not* randomly be invited. You will need to know someone, there's a list of "known good players", that are "brand safe". Blizzards wants the experience people see on streams to be as smooth as possible, and that's why they haven't let you spergs loose.
Anyways, onto the meat:
>There will obviously not be a cash-shop, even cosmetic, in Classic. This has been discussed again and again internally, and we always end on the same answer.
>Realm structure is as follows: EU players will all play on the same realm types. We will not be making special locale-specific regions.
>EU will start with 20 realms. Names are being developed as we speak, we get to pitch in, I can personally say that "Deathknell" is going to be a PvP server on the EU locale. US similarly gets 20 realms. Oceanic gets 10. These numbers are subject to change. Here's a little secret, the numbers we use to derive realm count and load balancing is based on a couple of different metrics. One of the important ones are stress test attendance, the other is how many has flagged their account for "Want WoW Beta". It's immensely helpful for trying to predict the market.
>Cross realm BG functionality is there, but will not be enabled unless que times are too long.
>RPPVP realms are being discussed.
If you have any specific questions I can try to answer them to the best of my ability. The only thing you cannot ask for is my name.
