THE WOW FOREVER COLLECTION · DISPATCH · RESEARCH CHECKED OCTOBER 15, 2026
Short answer: you won't be able to play with friends in other regions at launch, and Blizzard hasn't settled how many characters you can have per account. Both came from Clay Stone and Holly Longdale's interviews at PAX Australia, held October 9 to 11 in Melbourne. Across two video interviews and a keynote trip, the pair also said endgame gold will be easier to earn through normal play, PvP will run in reward periods between raid tiers, Oceanic players get local data centers tied to the North American megaservers, and some Forever features could come to retail one day. The gear progression answers from the same trip get their own piece: what Blizzard means by horizontal progression.
All quotes below are taken from the videos themselves. We cleaned out filler words only.
Cross-region play: "this is as far as we can take it"
Content creator Fiamma opened her October 12 interview by asking why players can't group across regions. Stone pointed to the infrastructure work it took to make Forever realmless at all. Players only pick a ruleset per region and land on what he called "essentially what are mega realms now." His conclusion: "Where we're standing right now from a technical perspective, this is as far as we can take it."
Fiamma cut in with "right now," and Stone agreed: "right now. Yeah." The other half of the answer was about law, not servers: "It's really hard to express how much detail is involved even regulatory, country by country, region by region... So it's not we don't want to try it. We just, we need a minute."
So no cross-region play at launch, and no timeline either. If you're choosing between regions with friends abroad, our realmless explainer covers how rulesets work.
Character cap: not decided
Fiamma asked how many characters an account can hold. Stone said: "I don't actually think that we've announced how many it will be at launch yet," then turned the question back on her. She asked for something like retail's limits. He mentioned "technical limitations," joking that the database engineers would burn his desk "to the ground" if he promised "infinite, no caps." The answer ended with "the fact that you asked, we'll think about it."
That is separate from name reservation, which is still three characters per account from October 27 to November 3. Our release date guide has the full schedule.
Forever features in retail: "Yes"
This is the line that got passed around. Fiamma brought up the BlizzCon feature where everyone in a dungeon group learns an appearance when it drops, even though only one person gets the item. She asked if that "and other features from Forever" could find their way into retail. The answer was a quick "Yes," then "We just got to talk about, you know, what's appropriate for each game."
The video doesn't show who is speaking at that moment, and we think it was Longdale but can't confirm it. Either way, nothing specific was announced. Elsewhere in the same video, one of them noted that "Forever is now on a different art exploration and training path than retail," which explains why the Skyborne and the reworked druid forms don't look quite like modern WoW.
Oceania: local data centers, connected to NA
Skill Up, who is based in Australia, asked Stone on Friends Per Second (uploaded October 11) whether Oceania would get its own megaserver. Stone said: "I've certainly learned to never say never," but "for launch though, the intention is that Oceania will have dedicated data centers that they'll be connected to to keep the ping rate low."
Grouping across the Pacific works like modern WoW's connected realms. "If someone in Oceania parties with someone in North America who is the party leader then they will effectively start connecting to North American servers at that point until they disband." Stone added that the "pro-social server infrastructure" should make the Oceanic data centers feel almost like their own community, since you keep running into the same people while leveling.
Endgame gold should be easier to come by
This was the most useful answer for anyone who remembers spending every raid night broke. Stone listed the economy tools the team brought over from Season of Discovery: faster spawn rates for gathering nodes and items sold on vendors, including "putting Black Lotus on a vendor and essentially setting a price cap."
Then he went further: "We have specific ways that we plan to make gold feel much more plentiful at Endgame through participating in just regular gameplay activities, let's say on a weekly basis." The goal is giving players "more than enough" or "close to enough" gold for consumables without removing "the meaningful grind that we intend to be in the game."
Skill Up asked whether that means weekly quests. Stone wouldn't commit to the name: "I hesitate to use the word weekly." It would likely be "some form of rewarding players for participating in systems or things that already exist in the game," and the cadence is "still a little bit up in the air."
He tied it directly to gold buying: RMT is "something that we absolutely plan to hold the line on." That is consistent with the Temporary Economy Holds Blizzard switched on this week.
PvP runs in reward periods, and other seasons aren't planned
Asked whether Forever might ever go seasonal, Stone said PvP is already "sort of like seasons": "We will have a period of time in between our raid tiers releasing that'll roughly align with essentially a period of PvP where you're able to earn certain rewards specific to that period of time." Beyond that, "I don't think that we have any other plans for it at this time."
Could Blizzard run a separate rules-change season like Season of Mastery or Season of Discovery again? "Yeah, of course," he said, then added that the team's "focus absolutely is on WoW Forever."
Nothing in either interview touched crowd control durations, which matters because "Fix Poly, Fear and Sap in PvP" passed 1,000 replies on the Forever forums in a single day on October 14. Blizzard has not responded to that thread.
Add-ons, resistance gear and the rapid-fire round
Add-ons. Skill Up asked whether Forever's add-on rules match retail. Stone didn't confirm that. He said the team "started from a place of we don't want add-ons or mods that effectively play the game for you," and argued Forever needs fewer helpers anyway because "some of those bosses only have like two mechanics." Could the rules end up looser or stricter than retail's? "Potentially," but "it's much less of a concern for us." Our add-on guide covers what works now.
Resistance gear. "Unlikely at the start." Stone confirmed that Molten Core "will not be unlocked at the start."
Alchemy. Asked if alchemy will be reworked so it's less essential for raiding: "I don't have an answer to that one just yet, but we are talking a lot about it."
Consoles. "We just don't have anything to announce today." He did say the gamepad response "has far exceeded our expectations."
Dungeon XP. Stone repeated the line from the October 8 changes: the team went "a little too high on the amount of XP rewarded from dungeon quests and maybe a little bit too low" on mob XP inside dungeons. Our October 8 dungeon XP piece has the numbers.
The keynote: Krol'dok Stronghold
Stone's PAX keynote was a look at how one new dungeon was built, Krol'dok Stronghold in the new Riverglades zone, plus the original pitch for Forever shown to Blizzard leadership. He told Skill Up some beta testers have already found their way into the zone, where they "can't do any quests" yet. Blizzard streamed the keynotes from PAX, but we haven't been able to find a full recording to check, so we're not reporting the slides secondhand. If one goes up, we'll add a summary here.
What we couldn't check
JackedIQ's October 11 interview with both developers covered collections, shaman tanks and whether Northrend or Pandaria could ever appear. We couldn't get a transcript, so we're leaving it out. AccountShark's recap quotes Stone saying shaman tanks are "not something we're officially pursuing right now at launch" and Longdale saying "nothing is off the table" on new continents. Treat those as reported, not verified by us.
Sources: Fiamma, FOREVER FEATURES IN RETAIL? Developer Interview with Holly Longdale & Clay Stone (October 12, 2026, quoted from the video, 00:53 to 04:10 and 12:04 to 12:32); Skill Up, We asked Blizzard the big questions about World of Warcraft: Forever, Friends Per Second #106 (October 11, 2026, Clay Stone segment from about 35:25 to 1:07:05, quoted from the video); Inven Global, Post-Beta 'WoW: Forever': What Is the Development Direction? (October 8, 2026); Icy Veins, Player Feedback and Cross-Region Possibilities in WoW Forever (October 2026); Blizzard, Watch Holly Longdale and Clay Stone's Keynote Presentations Live from PAX Aus 9-11 October (September 2026); AccountShark, WoW Forever Developer Interviews (Oct 12) (October 12, 2026); JackedIQ, I Asked Blizzard About WoW Forever… 3 BIG Questions Answered (October 11, 2026, not transcribed by us); Blizzard forums, Fix Poly, Fear and Sap in PvP (October 14, 2026, reply count checked October 15).