We’ve discussed it several times: Since the launch of WoW Classic, Blizzard developers have been struggling with overpopulated servers and poorly balanced realms (in terms of faction balance). Two problems they blame themselves. Problems that still exist today and are sometimes even getting worse.
In the European context, the Gehennas and Firemaw servers in particular have been among the biggest problem children in recent years. For example, in May 2022 we reported that Firemaw is bursting at the seams with more than 30,000 active characters. Two days later, Blizzard blocked the realm for the character transfer service, and the developers restricted the creation of new characters. In addition, it has been made possible to transfer characters from Firemaw to other EU servers for free.
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Firemaw is full? Appearance: Gehennas!
In the course of the following weeks, the community discovered a way to switch from a server that was too full to a server that was “only” heavily populated, and still take all the gold assets with them. The exploit worked by players taking a detour via the Razorgore server for their characters, i.e. from Firemaw to Razorgore to Gehennas. As a result, the number of players in Gehennas rose to a critical level in a very short time, so the developers announced on July 12, 2022 that that the transfer to Gehennas will be closed.
However, Blizzard reacted too late, and because numerous Horde players in particular had used this “trick”, the faction balance on Gehennas and Firemaw has been extremely one-sided since then. Gehennas is purely in Horde hands, while Firemaw flies the blue lion banner of the Alliance. In addition, both servers were still among the four most populated EU servers up to the last ID (Gehennas is even number 1 with 27,500 characters active in the endgame, via Ironforge.pro).
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Blizzard’s next attempt
A few days ago, community manager Kaivax announced on the official WoW forums that they have now opened free character transfers for Gehennas and Firemaw (in both directions). The reason: “Since the introduction of the faction change service in Wrath of the Lich King Classic, we’ve received a lot of feedback from players who are currently playing on locked realms with only one faction. They would like to change factions and play on another locked realm in their region pull.”
While server switching is free, faction switching for multiple characters is expensive. A change of faction costs 30 euros, three changes cost 60 euros and six changes cost 95 euros. Yesterday, March 6, 2023, there was an update from WoW developer Aggend:
“I wanted to give a quick update and let everyone know that we will be ending the free character moves from Firemaw to Gehennas next Tuesday 7th March at 16:00 CET. If you still have characters that you would like to move then do so please do so as soon as possible.
At the same time we will also unlock Firemaw and remove all transfer restrictions to that realm as enough players have left the realm for us to unlock it. We will be keeping the free transfers from Gehennas to Firemaw open a little longer, but we may close them at short notice. Gehennas will remain suspended until further notice.”
Since then, many players have let their displeasure run free under the post. The main reason: Due to the recent provision of free character transfers, there is said to have been a real exodus of characters and entire guilds on Firemaw, which is said to have worsened the situation on Gehennas and Firemaw alike. And that’s just to make a lot of money for a short time by changing factions, which are subject to a fee. How do you rate the situation? are you affected Tell us in the comments!
