Centurion is a free World of Warcraft private server built around Classic PvP. It runs on the 3.3.5a client, but the design target is Classic-era PvP with a custom layer on top: new talents, new spells, new gear and rebalanced racials. That custom layer is what we mean by Classic+.
Yes. Creating an account and playing costs nothing, and there is no subscription.
A 3.3.5a client. The Centurion launcher can patch a 3.3.5a client you already have, or you can download the bundle that includes one. Always start the game through CenturionLauncher.exe rather than WoW.exe, otherwise you will be missing patches and some spells and talents will be broken.
Download the launcher from the download page and extract CenturionLauncher.exe into your World of Warcraft folder, next to WoW.exe. Create a free account on the website, run the launcher, choose the Centurion realm, and log in with your account name - not your email address.
Tuned, not rebuilt. The quests, spells and mechanics are vanilla 1.12: hunters still have to Feign Death to trap, mounts are still a 3 second cast, CCs are still long with heartbeat resist, and there is no hit rating, crit rating or resilience. What changed is the balance and the endgame: new talents, new spells, new gear and rebalanced racials, with underperforming specs brought up somewhat rather than homogenised. Ideas are borrowed from later expansions only where they fit vanilla PvP, and counterplay is the test every change has to pass.
They are two different games on one account, and you choose which one at character creation. A world character plays the whole game: level 1 to 60, professions, the auction house, dungeons, raids, and an open world that can kill you and take your gear. A tournament character starts at 60 with a full set of starting gear and interfaces with the world in an extremely limited way - instanced PvP, duelling and honor progression only, with no farming, no professions and no dungeons. You can keep one of each.
Only if you choose to. Opt in to War Mode at your local innkeeper and the world becomes full loot, free-for-all PvP: you drop everything on death. The playerbots roaming the world play by the same rule, so they can kill you and sell your gear on the auction house, and you can kill them, take their gear, and sell it back to them.
Yes. You can go from level 10 all the way to 60 through battlegrounds or world PvP alone if you want to, without doing a single quest.
They are the opposite of the gold-farming bots you see on other servers. Nothing on Centurion is farming currency to sell, because there is nothing to buy and nowhere to sell it. Our AI players exist to make a small server playable: they fill out battlegrounds and skirmish arenas in under a second at any hour, sorted into easy, medium and hard so a filled match is not lopsided, and out in the world they quest, gather, list things on the auction house and buy their own upgrades. The online players page counts people and AI separately so you can always see which is which.
You are covered automatically. If your gear is worse than your dungeon set, you are equipped into that set for the duration of the match, and your own gear is restored the moment you leave the battleground.
Yes, on the world side. Dungeons and raids scale down, so two of you can clear a five man and five of you can clear a raid. Naxxramas and Onyxia have both been backported to 1.12. Tournament characters have no access to any of it by design.
Yes. Hardcore, Ironman and several others, opted into per character rather than realm-wide.
They were merged into Centurion and all characters came with them. Legionnaire+ characters are now tournament mode characters, and Barracks+ characters are now world mode characters, on one realm and one account.
No. We consider resilience a design mistake, along with class homogenisation and near-limitless mana pools, and none of them are part of how Centurion balances PvP.
Yes. The realm is factionless, which fixes a long list of class and race design problems and keeps queue times and matchmaking workable at any population. Outside designated sanctuaries you are in a free-for-all PvP zone. In a battleground, once team balancing is done, a coin flip decides whether you play for blue or red.
Yes. Battlegrounds and skirmish arenas are filled out with bots when there are not enough human players waiting, so a queue pops instead of sitting empty. You are never stuck waiting for a server-wide critical mass before you can play.
Yes, though battlegrounds come first. Roughly three quarters of our balance effort goes into making Warsong Gulch fun and fair, and a quarter into arenas. Of the arena brackets, 3v3 is the one we care about most: 5v5 is chaotic enough that almost anything finds a niche, and 2v2 is too small not to be dominated by metagaming.
Yes.
The Discord is at https://discord.gg/prS6t4UHYm, and it is the fastest way to get help, report a bug or find people to play with.