WoW: Realm Conversion

Announced today over on the official forums, Blizzard is going to be converting Drak’Thul from a PvP realm, into a PvE one.  This helps with population balance by allowing PvPers from Drak’Thul to move (for free) to one of three other lowish Population PvP servers to better balance those populations out.  It then creates, kinda by default, a ‘new’ realm for PvE usage, without having to actually put new hardware in.  I don’t believe the ‘realm first’ achievements get wiped, but thats because the PvPers don’t have to move, they can stay on Drak’Thul once the conversion is done.

Official Post here.

Copy/Paste of the announcement:

As part of our continued efforts to balance the World of Warcraft player population across all realms, we will be converting one of our lower-population PvP realms – Drak’thul — to a Normal PvE realm. For players on Drak’thul, we will be offering Free Character Moves to alternate PvP realms both before and for several weeks after the conversion takes place. This will allow us to continue to support healthy communities on the realms and help new players transition easily into the community.

In the event that any of these destination realms meet our transfer goals before the scheduled end date, the transfers to that may be disabled. We highly recommend that if you are planning to transfer that you do so at your earliest convenience. No characters will be eligible for these free moves once the transfers have been closed.

The conversion will take place on Tuesday, May 18th, with the Character Moves opening on May 11th and lasting until June 15th. Upon being converted to Normal PvE, Drak’thul will be given the “New Players” flag to ensure an influx of players over the coming weeks.

The following are the destination realms for Free Character Moves off of Drak’thul: