Blizzard sets up forums specifically to help you find your friends from vanilla WoW so you can play WoW Classic together

Part of the allure and nostalgia from original WoW were the connections players made as they were navigating the game for the first time. Playing an MMO is rough when you don’t have friends, so Blizzard is helping players reconnect through a special section of the WoW Classic forums.

The site Vanillafriends.com had already set up a way to connect with your old friends from back in the day and over 45,000 people registered. With a third-party site, it’s only as good as the word of mouth that can spread awareness around, though, and unfortunately people out of the know are likely to miss it. Blizzard has dedicated a part of the forums to help players have another avenue to reconnect with each other.

The main post starts a thread tree full of options to narrow down where you belong. You can filter by searching for your old Alliance or Horde friends, or go for the third option to find new people to play with. When you choose a faction, it takes you to another thread to filter which server type you played on during 2004-2006: Normal, PVP, RP, and RP-PVP. After that, you choose your server, which takes you to a dedicated thread for that server.

Each server thread instructs players to list their character’s name, race, and class, as well as your original guild and/or the character names of friends you’re searching for. There are a lot of comments already, so you can use the magnifying glass icon in the upper right corner of the webpage to search for specific names in the thread (by checking the box for “Search this topic”). The new forum revamp allows you to directly reply to comments that may be relevant to you.

If you didn’t play in vanilla WoW or just want to find a new community to join, you can still find friends. The third option in the main post is “I’m looking for new people I haven’t yet met,” which will take you to a recruitment forum for WoW Classic. Guilds can post their recruitment and players can post what they’re looking for.

Next week, players with an active subscription will be able to start reserving their character names (up to three) and you’ll be able to figure out where you want to play when Blizzard releases details about what servers there will be. While we wait for that, check out our guide about all the details for WoW Classic.