The WOTLK Classic Gold hardcore community currently uses an add-on and also the honor system to trace their progress, but official hardcore servers might be coming.
World of Warcraft's Classic Era realms could receive official "hardcore" servers later on if your since-deleted type of code based on the recent WoW 10.1 public test realm build will be believed.
WoW, Classic Era realms have experienced a big uptick in players previously few months because of a community "hardcore" challenge where dying even once in Blizzard's old-school MMORPG implies that character gets deleted. The challenge has already established its popularity bolstered recently by various WoW streamers and content creators also getting into the fun.
Two servers particularly, North America's Bloodsail Buccaneers and Europe's Hydraxian Waterlords, happen to be unofficially called "hardcore" servers through the community and have experienced a large increase in their populations consequently. A casual considers the game's subreddit features numerous posts about players accomplishing various hardcore feats or even the classic MMO's surge in popularity.
Currently, players make use of an add-on to enhance the hardcore experience. The Classic Hardcore add-on notifies other players using the challenge when someone dies and automatically uploads their progress to some leaderboard. However, the largest part of playing a hardcore character, needing to delete a character after death, continues to be done manually by players.
That could change if Blizzard introduced official hardcore servers, something which seems more likely now because of a few lines of code from Twitter user Meorawr (shared via Solanya on Twitter) based on the game's newest PTR build. Via PC Gamer, the code under consideration is for a "hardcore warning" pop-up around the game's realm selection and character creation screens that will give players a heads-up the character they're making only reaches live once. A few days following the discovery, Solanya posted that the code for that hardcore warning have been removed. Even though the code appeared around the PTR for that game's current Dragonflight expansion, the 2 versions of Blizzard's game share a lot of their infrastructure, meaning it's likely the hardcore warning pop-up was meant for WoW Classic Era realms.
It would likely make sense for Blizzard to introduce official hardcore servers. WoW, Classic recently concluded its Season of Mastery, an accelerated version of the MMORPG that made various aspects of the game tougher. Having a "Season of Hardcore" that takes advantage of a requirement that is already there locally would be a no-brainer. There's also the truth that Blizzard has acknowledged the sport's hardcore community before. In Season of Mastery, Blizzard introduced an NPC that grants players a buff called "Soul of Iron" that may only be put on characters who've never died, giving players who don't use add-ons the official way to showcase their hardcore prowess to others in-game.
Official hardcore servers would come with their very own sets of benefits and drawbacks. On the plus side, the official server will make it easier for that community to group together in one place and steer clear of griefers who are probably not participating in the task. On the downside, having Blizzard automate character deletion upon death means players would need to suffer through having their characters delivered to the shadowlands permanently for technical reasons the city currently doesn't view as legitimate, for example, server disconnections or bugs.
Blizzard hasn't yet publicly commented on the matter. The developer has devoted to more frequent content updates for WoW: Dragonflight in 2023, but Blizzard's plans for wotlk classic gold within the months ahead beyond planned content patches for Wrath from the Lich King Classic continue to be unknown.
