APOLLO

Dear community.

The merge of our Cataclysm realms is just around the corner and with that, we feel the need to explain some technical matters.
Hades and Artemis will be merged into one huge realm called Apollo. The merge will take place on the 24th of April 2019. The process is doable only when game servers are offline, which means that you won’t be able to connect to the game for the duration of the merge process.
The process will start on Tuesday, 23rd of April 2019 at 23:00 CEST. After that, we will do what needs to be done to successfully finish the merge of our realms. It’s not easy to approximate how long the merge will take. Our rough estimates are around 10 to 12 hours. You will be informed about the progress. We will cancel every Cataclysm character auction right before the merge. Every charcter will return to its original account.

The first step in the merge process is database backup. The process is quite complicated, and we want to be 100 % sure that you won’t lose anything by accident.

The second step is character purge. Why? The main reason is to have the lowest possible amount of name conflicts and to decrease the total volume of our database (which is quite large because it contains data that are older than 10 years in some cases). This purge will be done on our WotLK realm, Hyperion, at the same time.
Every character that doesn’t meet following criteria will be deleted:

• characters with played time lower than 4 hours which are offline for more than 1 year
• characters with level lower than 70 which are offline for more than 4 years (won’t affect Hades)

The third step will be a backup of the purged database after which the long-awaited merge will start.

Name collision won’t be completely avoided by the character purge. The character with more played time will keep its name while the other one will have to choose a new name after the merge.

Since this morning we disabled premium functions like rename, character customization, race change and faction change. If you plan on purchasing them before merge, you won’t lose them but will have to wait after the merge to use them. We decided to do so to prevent name thefts.

Apollo will have the well-known 3v3 event from Hades, with some minor tweaks. Details will be revealed after the merge.

Tomorrow, on the 17th of April 2019, arenas and rated BGs will be disabled and PvP season evaluation will begin on both realms. Rated brackets will be enabled after the merge. Every arena team, MMR and rated BG rating will be reset with the start of the new PvP season. Conquest points will stay as they are.

You can expect more information regarding the merge to follow.

Hades team