WoW Forever: the stress test moves to 21 October

Blizzard has moved the open stress test for WoW Forever by 2 days. It now runs on 21 October, and a community manager said plainly that it is not two days earlier as previously stated, which is the date we had.

For Europe it starts at 19:00 CEST. The Americas and Oceania get it the same day at 14:00 Pacific, and Asia sees it on the morning of 22 October. Anyone with a WoW account can take part and an active subscription is not needed.

The shape of it is more interesting than the date. The beta goes offline, and WoW Forever opens instead on the regional hardware it will actually run on at launch, as a live realm, for a few hours. That is the whole point: the servers people will queue for on launch night get a crowd thrown at them first.

Everything made during those hours is then deleted. Blizzard calls it a complete wipe, names included, after which the beta comes back as it was. What it asks for is ordinary play rather than heroics: make a character, run a few quests, trade, chat and group up, so the load looks like a real evening rather than a test script.