World of Warcraft: Classic official artwork showing off Ragnaros

[Update]: World of Warcraft: Classic's character creation and name reservation services are now live!

The greatest challenge in any MMO aren't the end-game raids or even high-level PvP battles, but rather the simple process of choosing the perfect name for your character. After all, you're going to invest hundreds of hours into them, so the name clearly has to be a good one... or at least one that's available after you've already lost 20 minutes cycling through variations of all of your favorites!

In order to sidestep this problem, as well as give the most dedicated players a chance to reserve their favorite names, Blizzard will be opening up character creation on August 12th at 3:00pm PDT. As expected, in order to create your WoW Classic characters ahead of time, you will need an active World of Warcraft subscription.

During the pre-release period you will be limited to creating three characters per WoW account, all of which will carry over to the full version. However, once WoW Classic releases on August 26th, you'll be able to create a maximum of 10 characters per server, as well as 50 character across your entire WoW Classic account.

As for the server names and types, Blizzard will be releasing more information about them later this week. Either way, you should have plenty of time to coordinate with your friends and all create characters on the same server and faction.

You can read a little bit more about this process, as well as follow any future announcements, over at the official forums.