World of Warcraft servers are finally coming to Australia

World of Warcraft went live on November 23, 2004. That, for those of you who don't happen to have a calendar handy, is a month shy of ten years ago. Ten years. And as that tenth anniversary approaches, Blizzard has announced that local servers in Australia are just about ready to go.

Players on an Oceanic realm—those being Barthilas, Frostmourne, Thaurissan, Saurfang, Caelestrasz, Jubei'Thos, Khaz'goroth, Aman'Thul, Nagrand, Dath'Remar, Dreadmaul, and Gundrak—should see their latency improve once the new servers are live. To accommodate Australians playing on North American realms, free character and guild master realm transfers will be offered for a limited time. Characters, gold, and guilds will not be affected by the change, and players on the the new Australian servers will still be able to play with friends in North America.

"Because the new Australian World of Warcraft game servers will continue to communicate with the existing North American hardware, players will still be able to play with friends on U.S game servers, just as they can today," Blizzard explained in the Australian Servers FAQ. "They’ll still be able to use their Battle.net friends list to easily group up and chat, regardless of where they are playing."

Blizzard is "aiming to" have the new servers online in advance of the November 13 release of the Warlords of Draenor expansion, but migrating the player data is a major undertaking. The plan is to take the servers currently hosting Oceanic realms offline on October 28 on the normal maintenance schedule, then make the switch and get the new servers up as quickly as possible.

Ten years is a long time to wait for your own local servers (although Australia is actually pretty huge, so "local" in this case is relative), but the response from players has nonetheless been very positive. Better late than never, right?

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.