Project Epoch Reborn went live on Friday, October 23, 2026 at 16:00 UTC, the date and hour its team set a month earlier, and the realm is still marked Online on the project site as of October 26. No launch-day post has appeared on the official announcements board — the only first-party evidence of the opening weekend is a changelog entry timestamped October 25 and a live status indicator, which is thinner than most server launches produce, and worth stating plainly before anything else.

What the site does confirm: registration is open, the account is shared between the website and the game, the client is 3.3.5a build 12340 with the project's own launcher, and Reborn is free to play with no donor gear. The setup path we documented in September is unchanged.

Original editorial illustration by RealmList, generated for this article. This is artwork, not game footage or official promotional material.

The dates that matter now

Reborn's roadmap page is the one page that has been updated to reflect a post-launch reality. It labels content dates as approximate, which matters for planning:

The gap between launch and the first raid night is six weeks, which is the single most useful number here: it is roughly the time a regular player needs to reach 60 and gear through the server's dungeon content, and it is also the window in which Reborn has to prove it can hold a population. Note that the three 2027 entries are grouped together on the roadmap with no individual dates — anyone planning a guild around Alterac Valley or a Uldum raid is guessing.

The first changelog reads like a healthy server

The October 25 changelog, labelled 24/10/2026, is a list of ordinary correctness fixes rather than damage control. Nothing in it references a rollback, an outage or lost characters:

• Battleground correctness — double Warmode buffs when queuing with cross-faction enabled, reputation awarded to the wrong faction, the resurrection timer breaking when a player cancels it, Focused Assault not clearing on exit, and the missing Warsong Gulch weekly quest.
• Class bugs — Hibernate no longer persists through damage-over-time effects, Crusader Strike's bonus no longer applies twice to Judgement of Righteousness, and warlock pets no longer put their owner in combat before attacking.
• Quality of life — ore nodes restored to Teldrassil, pets now path down cliffs in battlegrounds instead of running the long way around, a quest roleplay sequence ("HoA") that kept resetting, and a macro that allowed casting while walking.

A minimum world-chat level was also enabled, which is the standard first-week answer to gold-selling spam. For a volunteer project rebuilding custom content on a 3.3.5a core, a fix list this mundane three days in is a better signal than a triumphant announcement would be.

The population question has no official answer

Reborn publishes no player counter, and neither the homepage nor the announcements board quotes a launch figure. The only number in circulation comes from a player-run betting pool on the forum, where participants guessed the online count one hour after opening. Guesses ranged from 67 to 2,200. The organiser posted the result on October 23 at 21:04:

589 Online after 1h.

Treat that as a player estimate, not a measurement — it is consistent with a /who-style count at a single moment, has no stated method, and the project has not confirmed it. It does, however, sit in the same range as the community's own expectations: the median guess in that thread was well under a thousand, and several participants openly framed the pool as a referendum on whether a niche Classic+ revival could draw a crowd at all. For context on why these numbers are so hard to read, see how to verify private server population claims.

The structural problem is timing. Reborn launched twelve days before WoW: Forever, Blizzard's own vanilla-plus project, which opens name reservation on October 27 and launches November 4. Every private server in this niche is about to be measured against a first-party alternative with Blizzard's marketing behind it. Reborn's counter-argument is content Forever does not have — custom zones, Racial Knowledge, Soul of Iron and the Explorer's Contract — plus a December 4 raid unlock that lands five days before Forever's own December 9 raid opening.

What a new player is walking into

• Raids are not open. Molten Core and Onyxia's Lair are five weeks away at minimum; the current endgame is dungeons and the two optional challenge modes.
• The custom systems are live — reworked classes, Racial Knowledge ability sets chosen at 60, transmogrification, Warmode with Bloody Tokens, and the Battle for Hillsbrad.
• The beta population carried over partially. The team opened name reservation on October 2 for the 2,206 accounts that had played the beta, one early reservation each. Everyone else registers fresh.
• Community infrastructure is on Fluxer, not Discord, which is unusual enough to trip up newcomers looking for a Discord invite.

::note Verified on October 26, 2026 against the official roadmap page, the October 25 changelog post ("24/10/2026"), the live realm status on project-epoch.org, the September 25 launch announcement and the October 23–25 forum betting thread. The 589 figure is a player's self-reported count with no published method and is not an official population number — Reborn has published none. Roadmap dates are the project's own and are explicitly labelled approximate. No launch-day announcement from the team was found, so the "on time and still online" claim rests on the roadmap date plus current realm status. Patch 1.0.5 through 1.3.0 content summaries come from the roadmap and secondary reporting, not from patch notes. ::