Australian servers announced for the World Of Warcraft

Blizzard shocked the Australian fans with a surprise announcement that the Australian World of Warcraft servers are set to go live on October 28 in advance of the new expansion, Warlords of Draenor, which will be launching on the 13th of November.

World Of Warcraft is the world's biggest MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. This is a monthly subscription service that peaked at 12 million subscribers but still hosts an incredible 7.4 million active subscribers. The game is in the league of its own in the world of MMORPGs.

Australian players first joined the game via North American servers about a decade ago. Later, Blizzard launched Oceanic servers that were set to follow Australian time Zones, but the servers were still located on the west coast of North America.

Blizzard is now transferring the Oceanic servers to an Australian hosting location. This will allow the Australians who have used some of these old de facto servers to make a free character transfer to the new local servers for a limited time. The Oceanic servers will transfer during an extended server maintenance next Tuesday night, that will be going live on October 28.

Ion Hazzikostas, the lead game designer on World of Warcraft, who visited Australia as part of prelaunch festivities for Warlords of Draenor stated, " Better late than never, ultimately" and also added that, "We know we have a lot of passionate players here and it's something we've wanted to do for a long time. There are a lot of complexities and logistics that have gone into it to make sure that we're doing it right. So finally the stars have aligned and we're just happy to be able to roll out the feature now."

The local servers ultimately led to a faster, smoother gameplay experience to which, Hazzikosras says that it will be benifiting every player of the game and not just the hardcore raiders and PvPers.

"Playing the game with 40ms latency versus 300ms latency is just a better experience no matter what you're doing," Hazzikostas told CNET. "Except maybe pet battles."