Here's a heads up for all our Russian speaking readers: Starting on August 6th, WoW Europe will begin selling the fully localized Russian version of World of Warcraft and Burning Crusade, complete with a Russian-speaking support team.

The game will be sold in DVD and CD versions and will include 1 month and 14 days of free play time respectively. There will also be a special Russian pricing plan starting at 399 rubles per a month for a 1-month subscription.

In addition, current European account holders will have the option of playing on the new Russian servers after downloading the localization pack. There will also be free transfers to the Russian servers for a limited time, and the opportunity to convert a European account to a Russian account.

For more information, you can check out the official Russian site.

Blizzard is once again expanding its World of Warcraft player base. July 25^th will mark the launch of Latin American Servers for Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. The expansion will be supported and sold in other countries in the future. New players can also purchase the Burning Crusade and 60 day prepaid game cards. A free trial is available at juegawarcraft.com.

The launch will be accompanied by celebratory events with Blizzard staff:

July 25
Blockbuster Pilares
Av. Universidad #697
Del Valle,

July 26-27
Plaza Satelite
Estado de Mexico,

If you're a regular reader of our Guildwatch feature, you may remember hearing about the woes of the Oceanic PvP realm Thaurissan on the last Guildwatch. The server is incredibly Horde heavy, with an estimated 14 to 1 imbalance, and the server denizens say it is genuinely near impossible to get 25 people together to do raid content on the Alliance side. Unfortunately , we also know that Blizzard is still firmly against PvE to PvP realm transfers, which may be preventing Thaurissan from getting the influx of new blood they need.

However, for the sake of Thaurissan's Alliance, they have suspended this restriction. Starting today, June 12th, and ending no later than June 19th, Alliance characters (and only Alliance characters) from the Oceanic PvE realms Nagrand, Aman'thul, and Khaz'goroth will be eligible for free transfers to the Thaurissan realm. Blizzard reserves the right to close transfers early if they meet their goals, so if you're eligible and you want to go, you'd better get that request in now.

This is not the first time they've done this type of thing. Over two years ago, a large cluster of PvE realms were given the opportunity to transfer to the Black Dragonflight and Dalvengyr PvP servers. Thus, it seems that they can be convinced to waive their restrictions on transfers, but that a chance to do so may only come up once every 2 years. Good luck to everyone transferring to Thaurissan, and hopefully this gives the Thaurissan Alliance the shot in the arm they need to get their end game going.

Bornakk announced today that free character transfers are available for the following realms:

• Illidan
• Mal'Ganis
• Sargeras
• Tichondruis
• Warsong
  

You can transfer from the above realms to:

• Azshara
• Maiev
  

The transfers are available from today at 12:00 p.m. PDT until next Friday April 25th at 12:00 p.m. PDT. Of course, Blizzard reserves the right to shut down the transfers if they meet their internal numbers prior to the close date. They have been known to close down transfers early, so transfer soon if you want to take advantage of this.

WoW Insider will always keep you up-to-date on the latest realm news, so stay tuned!

Bornakk, ye ol' blue poster, has announced a good bunch of character moves tonight. These moves will be active from March 28th (tomorrow) at noon PDT, and go until April 4th at noon PDT (next Friday). Get your character moves in fast if you want to take advantage of this, they often are shut off early.

There are two transfer groups available.

For the first transfer group, you can transfer from llidan, Mal'Ganis, Tichondrius, Gurubashi, Warsong, Mannoroth, and Burning Blade to Azshara, Maiev, Zuluhed, and Lethon.

For the second transfer group, you can transfer from Argent Dawn, Zul'jin, Ghostlands, and Aggramar to Muradin and Sisters of Elune.

Bornakk also tells us that the realms you can transfer off of have been chosen because they have had the highest sustained queues. The realms you can transfer to are the lowest population realms. This is an interesting tid bit of information from generally closed-door decision making.

Enjoy your transfers!

In a forum post about the ultimate downfall of WoW, Drysc pops in to explain that WoW still has a long lifespan ahead of it. People who say that the lack of new servers proves there are fewer and fewer new players in the game are missing the big picture. Back before The Burning Crusade was launched, Blizzard did a series of server upgrades that left each realm down for a few days. At the time, they said this was to make things ready for the expansion, but little did we know it would be to such an extent.

Apparently these upgrades allowed Blizzard to keep pushing the maximum realm population up all this time, as more and more players joined the game. There are some relatively "low" population realms, of course, but only in comparison to the new much-increased maximum limit. As Drysc says, "aside from literally a handful of realms (I could count them on one hand), every other realm has a population that would have been considered high to overpopulated before the launch of Burning Crusade." Only recently have certain realms become truly crowded enough to merit free transfers to other realms.

People always like to talk about the eventual downfall of the strongest player in any arena, but the steady growth Drysc is talking about continues, it looks like WoW will be the biggest 800-pound gorilla in the MMO jungle for a good long time to come.

In what must be extremely welcome news to players down under, Blizzard is offering free character transfers from overpopulated Oceanic realms starting today, Thursday, December 20th until December 27th or until transfer goals are met.

Because they will close the transfers early if necessary, Drysc highly recommends that if you are planning to move your characters that you do so as soon as possible. If you wish to take advantage of the free move, go to this link, where it will ask you for your account info before proceeding.

Blizzard has also opened a new PvE realm, specifically for this transfer. New character creation on Caelestrasz will be turned off until the transfers have been completed.

The eligible Oceanic realms are listed after the jump.

As reported on the WoW LJ community, selected realms are getting free transfers to lower population realms. I will admit to being a tad disappointed that the realm where most of my alliance characters languish isn't one of those realms. But for the inhabitants of a super-crowded realm this can only be good news, and I congratulate you all for getting a chance to move while the offer is open.

The complete list of realms who will be getting these transfers and the destination realms will be presented after the jump in case you can't access the links for one reason or another. If you are on one of the realms being offered the move, you have from Thursday, December 6th to Thursday the 13th to get your bags packed and make the trip to your new homes.