Posts with tag OceanicRealms

Perhaps you're not aware, but Australian and North American World of Warcraft players share the same realms. This has created all sorts of troubles for the Australian player approaching the game. Firstly, sharing a game-space with North American players means that many players are in a time zone far separated from your own, and finding instance and raiding groups during the hours when most of the players are sleeping is a problem. Secondly, regularly scheduled maintenance, set during a low activity time for those on the right continent, hits right during prime playing time. While, more recently, Blizzard has been rolling out realms specifically flagged "Oceanic" and set to Australian time zones, they're still located with the rest of the North American realms and subject to the same maintenance schedule. And with few Oceanic servers available, they've become flooded with players and subject to lag and instability. Whether Blizzard will be able to fix its Oceanic mess or not... well, we'll see.

[Thanks, Dave]

Well, they aren't going to be opened immediately, but there are plans for two new Oceanic realms (one PvE and one PvP) to open mid-May.  With only a few existing Oceanic servers, this will hopefully alleviate overcrowding.  Of course, this does not much help existing Oceanic players who started out on non-Oceanic realms before there were any Oceanic realms - chances are they'll be waiting for pay-for character transfers if they want to swap.