Hello everyone,
As we were recently discussing our long terms plans for Mists of Pandaria Classic’s realms, we all felt that the “mega realm” direction used to great success in Season of Discovery and then Classic Era Anniversary has led to an almost universally improved player experience, with availability for grouping at all hours, Auction House health and a massive pool of players for Guilds to pull from. We believe it will also have such a positive effect for Mists of Pandaria Classic too.
Since these moves are very disruptive we felt that starting this process sooner rather than later would be for the best, even though we know many of you are currently quite happy with the health of your specific realms, so we appreciate it if this feels sudden or uncalled for, but we do think you’ll enjoy the results once the dust settles!
With next week’s maintenance and patch deploy on September 23rd we will be enabling Free Character Transfers on US Mists of Pandaria Classic realms to the destination realm Pagle. The PvP realms in the region will also be re-flagged as PvE to better reflect their current faction war status. Players on previously PvP realms wishing to engage in a PvP experience once more will have the option of moving to the Grobbulus (RP-PvP) realm, this realm will also have forced faction balancing enabled. This unique realm has withstood the test of time and remained a hot bed of world PvP, and we will be working to make sure that it remains faction balanced. If you wish to get a taste of what Mists of Pandaria might have looked like on a contested PvP realm, this will be your chance!
Full list of Free Character Moves:
Faerlina → Nazgrim
Mankrik → Galakras
Benediction → Ra-den
Atiesh → Lei Shen
Whitemane → Immerseus
Bloodsail Buccaneers → Pagle
Sulfuras → Pagle
Windseeker → Pagle
Azuresong → Pagle
Westfall → Pagle
Old Blanchy → Pagle
Ashkandi → Pagle
Nazgrim, Galakras, Ra-den & Lei Shen are “virtual” realms running on Pagle, just like connected realms players on these realms will see a “-Nazgrim” appended to their name, all character and guild names will be available on each one of these virtual realms, but all players will be able to join guilds, raids, dungeons with anyone in the connected realm group.
Faerlina → Grobbulus (RP-PvP)
Benediction → Grobbulus (RP-PvP)
Whitemane → Grobbulus (RP-PvP)
The AU realm Arugal will also switch to PvE to enable both factions to play in this region. AU realm health will be monitored and your feedback appreciated, we understand that merging AU realms into US realms results in a significant rise in latency so we will wait till this merge is overwhelmingly requested.
Pagle & Grobbulus will have their realm caps increased to effectively unlimited. No additional latency or performance issues are expected as a result of this consolidation of players. The layering/sharding systems in the game distribute load regardless of a realms capacity. Expected times to process your character transfers will vary greatly depending on demand, we have seen previously under extreme load this process take several hours so plan accordingly, under normal circumstance the processing time is 2-5 minutes.
Transfers to Pagle are not time limited, you and your guilds may take as much time as you wish to plan your moves, you may also remain on your original realms if you wish, but the source realms will be closed to new players and will slowly shrink. We have seen overall increased satisfaction and engagement when players are on these larger “mega realms” and we believe this will offer you the best experience for the rest of your time in Mists of Pandaria.
Transfers to Grobbulus may be halted for either faction temporarily without warning to ensure that faction balance is maintained, if you plan on transferring with a group we would recommend you all do so at once.
We thank you for joining us on this Classic journey and look forward to seeing this amazing community united together.