The important information for all fans of WoW Burning Crusade Classic first: The free server transfers to the EU Classic BC server Gehennas will be closed soon. Blizzard’s WoW community manager Kaivax talks about the end of this service being made 24 hours after the announcement at the earliest. Announced on July 11, 2022 at 23:00 our time. This week still (until July 17, 2022), the free transfer to EU-Gehennas will then be deactivated. In order, as Kaivax points out, to prevent Gehennas from becoming overpopulated. A look at the population statistics of Ironforge.pro’s EU servers reveals that such overpopulation is already happening – on the Horde side. To explain why this is the case, we need to elaborate a bit.

Overpopulation on Firemaw

In February 2022, the developers of World of Warcraft. looking at the European server statistics, noticed that a large part of the gaming community meets on the realm Firemaw. Since there are limits on active characters on one server, mass transfers to this very active and with a healthy PvP balance mega server (and character creation, of course) caused queues to be activated at login. And the WoW creators don’t think you should waste your valuable game time waiting.

That’s why Blizzard’s developers asked Firemaw players to consider switching to a less populated server and activated free server transfers. Four layers at once, trying to accommodate all the players in Firemaw’s open world, simply put the hardware to a big test. “Adding more layers would not increase the total number of players allowed to be on a realm at once. That maximum is limited by the limits of the hardware,” Kaivax explained.

Character stop on Firemaw

Unsurprisingly, most Classic players weren’t too keen on moving from a lively server to a rather “dead” realm. That’s why the developers put the brakes on in May 2022. and stopped character creation for Firemaw to put a stop to the “megaserver”. With little success. While there were still about 30,000 players active in raids on Firemaw in May 2022, there are still just under 26,000 in July 2022. So really many heroes have not moved.

And now the free transfers to the EU server Gehennas have to be stopped, because that’s where mostly Horde players have migrated to now, bursting the server seams. Gehennas counts almost 20,000 active raid characters and is thus slowly but surely heading towards Firemaw’s proportions. Moreover, there are hardly any servers with a greater faction imbalance; measured by the amount of active raid characters, mind you.