World of Warcraft’s Classic fanbase is firmly in detective mode right now, and they’ve found something genuinely curious. Days before BlizzCon 2026 — scheduled for September 12 and 13 at the Anaheim Convention Center — dataminers dug into the CSS (cascading style sheet) of Blizzard’s Gear Store website and found a colour palette tagged under a very specific label: “wow 2”. Then Blizzard quietly renamed it. Which, as any WoW community member will tell you, is not the move of a company that has nothing to hide.
Here’s what was found, what it might mean, and how it fits into months of growing evidence that something major is about to be announced for WoW Classic.
What Did Dataminers Actually Find?
Dataminer Stiven — the same person responsible for several of the earlier Project Camelot discoveries — spotted a new colour scheme added to Blizzard’s Gear Store source code. The palette was initially labelled “wow-camelot” in the CSS, before Blizzard changed the tag to “wow-2__color-scheme” shortly after the discovery was tweeted out.
The colours themselves are a spread of mostly blue shades alongside a light red, brown, and white. What makes them notable is how dramatically they differ from the colour schemes already assigned to other Blizzard game tags in the same codebase — existing entries for standard World of Warcraft, WoW Midnight (the current retail expansion), Diablo, Overwatch, and others all have their own distinct palettes. This new one sits apart from all of them, suggesting it’s attached to something new.
The community reaction on the r/classicwow Reddit thread was predictably energetic. The fact that Blizzard changed the CSS class name from “wow-camelot” to “wow-2” after the discovery became public is what’s really stoking the fire. As Icy Veins noted in their coverage, there are a few possible explanations: a scrub to obscure the Camelot connection, damage control after an early exposure, or simply a routine code reorganisation. The community has landed firmly on the former interpretation.
A CSS colour class is not a product announcement — it is technically possible this is just a second WoW-specific store palette with no deeper meaning. But given everything else that’s been building for months, that reading is a very hard sell right now.
What Is WoW Classic Plus (Project Camelot)?
For those not deep in the WoW Classic rabbit hole: Classic Plus is the community’s name for something WoW players have been requesting for years. The concept is simple — instead of just replaying old content in its original form, Blizzard would take the bones of vanilla WoW (the original 1-60 game) and build something new and permanent on top of it. New content, new abilities, new zones and raids, but all set within the original Azeroth rather than the modern retail version of the game.
The best comparison is what Jagex did with Old School RuneScape. They started with a perfect snapshot of the 2007 version of the game — the one players were nostalgic for — and then kept adding new content that respected the original design philosophy. OSRS has since become more popular than the mainline RuneScape game. WoW Classic players have been watching that happen for years and asking Blizzard to do the same thing.
Internally, this project appears to go by the codename “Project Camelot” — which is what makes the CSS tag rename from “wow-camelot” to “wow-2” so pointed. The community had already been using “Camelot” as the shorthand for this rumoured project, so seeing those exact words appear in Blizzard’s backend code, then get quietly changed, is feeding the narrative hard.
The Evidence Trail — Everything Leading Up to BlizzCon
The CSS find is the latest in a long series of breadcrumbs that have been accumulating since late 2025. Here’s the full picture:
- October 2025 onwards: At least 29 distinct encrypted builds for a mysterious Classic patch 1.60 have appeared on Blizzard’s CDN — tied to the July 2006 client build associated with Blackwing Lair. The sheer volume of builds suggests sustained development rather than a one-off test environment.
- January 29, 2026: During Blizzard’s State of Azeroth presentation, Executive Producer Holly Longdale was conspicuously cut off mid-sentence while telling Classic players they had “a lot to look forward to” — a moment the community has treated as deliberate staging. Blizzard confirmed more information would come “after The Black Temple, at BlizzCon 2026.”
- May 2026: Blizzard invited a selection of WoW Classic influencers and streamers to the studio for what were described as vague and unspecified reasons. The community’s read: they were shown something.
- June 16, 2026: Dataminer Stiven found Heroic and Epic edition licence entries for “World of Warcraft Camelot” in game files on a branch separate from the retail client. This is significant because seasonal test modes don’t get two purchase tiers — products do. These are the same licensing structures used for full expansion launches.
- September 2026: The CSS colour palette discovery — first labelled “wow-camelot,” then renamed “wow-2” — right before BlizzCon weekend.
On top of the datamining, Blizzard also shut down Turtle WoW — one of the largest Custom Classic Plus private servers — in a legal action earlier in 2026, which some have interpreted as clearing the field ahead of an official launch.
What Season of Discovery Proved
Part of why the Classic Plus speculation has such strong legs is that Blizzard already ran an experiment that showed the demand is real. Season of Discovery, which ran from late 2023 through to its final Phase 8 in early 2025, was widely praised for taking the classic framework and adding new abilities via a Rune Engraving system, expanded dungeons, new raids, and a phase-based level cap structure that kept the game feeling fresh. Players who discovered new content together in real time — without dataminers spoiling everything in advance — described it as recapturing something genuinely exciting about old-school MMO play.
Blizzard themselves acknowledged the data Season of Discovery provided. In their 2025 year-end letter, the development team wrote that they had “big plans and big ambitions” for content set in the original world of Azeroth, and that they needed time to take “lessons learned from Season of Discovery into something truly exciting.” That’s not marketing language for “we’re not doing anything” — that’s the preamble to an announcement.
What BlizzCon Is Expected to Deliver
BlizzCon 2026 runs September 12-13 at the Anaheim Convention Center, and the schedule Blizzard released includes the traditional Opening Ceremony on Saturday the 12th alongside a dedicated “World of Warcraft: What’s Next” panel. If there is a major Classic reveal imminent, those are the two slots where it would land — the Opening Ceremony for the big unveil, the What’s Next panel for the detail.
Anonymous leaks circulating on MMO-Champion and 4chan have been pointing to a potential October 13, 2026 launch date for whatever this project turns out to be, with early access from October 10 for a premium edition. No part of that is officially confirmed, and a launch just four weeks after a reveal would be unusually fast for Blizzard — but the licence tiers found in the datamine suggest some level of launch readiness.
Unverified community leaks have also described features including new playable races, a new class, new zones, and a seasonal reset cycle with a battle pass — though none of this has been confirmed by client data or official sources, and should be treated accordingly.
Should You Actually Believe This Is Happening?
The honest answer is: something is clearly happening with WoW Classic, but exactly what it is remains officially unconfirmed. The technical evidence — encrypted builds running since October 2025, Heroic and Epic licence tiers, the CSS palette appearing and being renamed — is more substantial than typical community speculation. These aren’t vibes. They’re backend artefacts with real development implications behind them.
At the same time, “Classic Plus” as fans imagine it — a permanent, OSRS-style expanding Vanilla WoW with completely new content — is a massive undertaking. Even if Project Camelot is real and announced at BlizzCon, whether the actual product matches the community’s expectations is a separate question. Blizzard has a long history of delivering things that are directionally right but specifically different from what players imagined.
For now, the CSS tag is the latest piece of a puzzle that’s been assembling itself for the better part of a year. Whether it completes the picture or turns out to be a dead end, BlizzCon 2026 is less than two weeks away — and after months of encrypted builds, staged teases, and influencer invitations, WoW Classic players are finally going to get some answers. Major gaming announcements are flying thick and fast right now, and this one has the potential to be one of the biggest for MMO fans in years.
Saturday, September 12. Opening Ceremony. Mark it.
