No April fool’s gag. All realms, except a for handful are down right now. My alts on Kul Tiras are up, albeit sluggish[1], Daggerspine and Gnomeregan are down. I called Blizzard on behalf of metblogs and got a “no comment” statement. The friendly PR person on the other side of the phone, however, was nice enough to ensure me, that these downtimes are not related to the extended outages in March 2005 and April 2006 as well as April 2007, which happened, curiosly enough, after a content patches not unlike this one.

[1] The sluggishness and login queues are almost certainly a result of massive waves of level one alt re-rolls invading realms that are currently online. One has to wonder just how addicted a player has to be to taper off to a realm he or she will most certainly never visit again to roll a level one alt.

A brand-new European PvE realm opened last Friday, Lightbringer. Along with half of the world, it seemed, I was there at the start - and my god, it was chaos! We all logged in with our list of favourite names, to claim as many of them as possible. I got three of mine :) Most of us, I think, were already potential members of guilds, as people had been forming groups in the week or so prior to the realm opening.

The human starting area was hilarious. You couldn’t kill a mob for love nor money; all you could see were dead wolves and kobolds everywhere, having been simultaneously hit by four, five, six desperate level ones at the same time. Absolute madness, but very funny. So, I went to make a nelf instead, and that starting area was less crowded (surprisingly), so I joined the ranks of nelf hunters trying to level.
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Greetings citizens of Azeroth! I am very excited be a contributor to this site, and I hope that I do not disappoint. I have been an avid reader of this blog for many months now, and I am looking forward to sharing my experinces with this community.

Now that the introductions have been dispensed with, on to the real post.
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I’m getting a little antsy with my main, and a little bored with my alts. With the exception of one level 18 Undead Rogue, I have yet to really experience the Horde content. There’s a whole other game over there (so I’ve heard), and I’d love to see what the Bad Guys have in store for me.

So, there’s something I need from you lovely readers: what server should I join?

I ask this only because I don’t make friends very easily when I just drop into a new server; I like to have at least one or two ready-made buds to chat with while I grind up my levels. A kick-ass and friendly social guild might be nice, too. A few caveats: I know I’m going to play a Shaman (only class I have yet to try, even a little), I’m a somewhat busy person and thus casual player, and I get along with anybody who can put a sentence together.

Any suggestions? Anybody want to be my friend? Anybody want to make another alt and enjoy the other side with me?

About 97 people have sent me the link to this screen shot in the last hour or so. Looks like a pretty detailed FAQ on the long awaited character transfers that we’ve all been waiting a long time for. I heard last week from a few inside-blizzard-birdies that these things were “very close” to being ready to happen, so that makes this screenshot a ton more believable - to me at least.

It also confirms my guess that there would be no PvE to PvP transfers offered, but that PvP to PvE would be OK. Other restrictions include obvious limites on gold, xfrs to high pop servers, and things like that. Check it.

UPDATE: Just got two independent confirmations that this is legit, and seems like a final version of something they’d seen earlier. Also, logging into to your account on worldofwarcaft.com and clicking the character trasnfer option gives you this message:

“The Character Move feature is currently closed. Please watch www.worldofwarcraft.com for any announcements regarding the availability of Character Move.

We are looking into the possibility of allowing customers more freedom in transferring to realms of their choice in the future. No further details are currently available concerning this feature, but any new information (regarding this or similar services) will be posted on www.worldofwarcraft.com as soon as it is available.”

Which is definitely a new massage, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing this open up any day now. More here