World of Warcraft Classic, the server option that returns players to the golden heydey of Blizzard's legendary MMO, will soon be entering its fourth phase. Following the release schedule of the original title way back in 2004, WoW Classic is slowly advancing the game with new updates every few weeks.
Phase 4 will follow on from the launch of Phase 3 on February 12th. While Phase 3 focused on Darkmoon Faire and Blackwing Lair, Phase 4 will see players taking on the 20-man raid Zul'Gurub and the associated Zandalar Tribe reputation. For those who just can't wait, Blizzard has made the new Phase available on their Test Realm.
Joining the PTR
Players wanting to play on the PTR (Public Test Realm), must first install it through the Battle.net launcher. This is done by opening the World of Warcraft tab, switching to the Version menu, and then selecting PTR: World of Warcraft: Classic.
Thankfully there's no need to reinstall the full game to play on the PTR, and the download for the WoW Classic Test Realm is only 500MB. Once it's installed players should launch the game and choose their preferred server type, either Player vs Environment or Player vs Player. This will have the same impact on gameplay that it does in vanilla WoW Classic.
Picking a Character
Once players have picked a server, they need to choose whether they want to create a new character or copy one from the vanilla game. It's worth noting that a copied character will not affect the character it is cloned from on the live servers, and anything done on the PTR will not transfer over. Creating a character follows the same process as vanilla WoW Classic: choosing a race, sex, class, appearance, and name.
Players who'd prefer to play with their own Retail World of Warcraft character will need to click the Copy Character option instead of creating one. Then, select the Region that the desired character is currently in, and simply choose them from a list of names. There are some limitations to this: characters below level 10 can't be copied, and the WoW Classic data may be incorrectly copied. This can be corrected by clicking on Copy Data in the Launcher.
World of Warcraft Classic is available now on PC.