World of Warcraft Classic's Hardcore Servers Coming August 24th

mmorpg.com:

World of Warcraft Classic fans don't have much longer to wait, as the upcoming Hardcore realms will be hitting the MMORPG on August 24th.

After a month of testing on the PTR, Blizzard announced today on their website that Hardcore realms were officially opening up at the end of August. The new Hardcore Realms brings a new way to play World of Warcraft Classic, where death is permanent. No more running back and forth from the graveyard. It's game over for that character.

Face Azeroth’s dangers in WoW Classic’s Hardcore realms and see just how far you can go. You only have one life to live, and the Spirit Healers won’t be there to whisper sweet nothings and send you back out into the world of the living when you die. Death is permanent, and once you’ve been bested by the environment (or even other players), you’ll need to create a new character to try, try again. 

Players have been playing their own versions of Hardcore on their own, with self-imposed rules on dying in their playthroughs. Now, with the new Hardcore realms in WoW Classic, those rules are imposed server-wide. No corpse run, you become a ghost when you die. No player resurrections, either. When your raid group wipes, it very truly wipes.

Thankfully, if you do die, you can hang on the server as that ghost, allowing you to tie up any loose ends (like transfer guld leadership, for one). 

This permadeath can come at the hands of an unsuspecting strike from a creature, or even another player, meaning that there are new stakes on WoW's legendary PvP servers. Thankfully, though, WoW's devs have stated you'll have to flag yourself for PvP very intentionally, so hopefully players won't be randomly PK'ed if they weren't wanting to participate in the player-versus-player