APOLLO

Dear players,

as promised, we bring you more details about the upcoming merge of Apollo and Athena, happening on Wednesday, November 6th.

Duration of the merge

The process will begin at 5:00 AM server time, when both realms will be brought offline. As usual, we will start the merge with a database backup, followed by running the merge scripts. Due to the size of the databases, the realms will be offline for approximately 4 to 8 hours (we will do our best to finish as soon as possible).

To decrease the load on the database, Helios will also be unavailable during this time, from 5:00 to 12:00 server time.

Realm name

This is the first time we are merging two realms with different names in the past 5 years, and so we had to decide the name of the resulting realm. After careful consideration, we have chosen Athena to be the continuing name of the realm, holding solely the banner of Cataclysm into the future. We feel this is the right decision, given the amount of love and work that went into the project, and its numerous distinguishing features.
Nevertheless, the name Apollo shall stay forever in our hearts, and its legacy will prevail in both Athena and Helios. ❤️

Character purge

We would like to address the questions we have received regarding the earlier purge on Apollo: While we cannot restore any characters affected by the purge, the vast majority of them are still available to play on Helios. The criteria (announced 2 months prior to the purge) were made much stricter than usual only in a way that did not include characters that had not had a chance to be cloned to Helios. Thanks to this, it was possible to dramatically improve the performance of the database while offering those who were actively playing on Apollo to keep their characters.

Other details

• After the merge, the Mists of Pandaria Character Transfer service will be restricted to transferring at most 10000 gold alongside the character.
• In case of name collisions, the character with more played time will keep their name while the other one will be offered a rename for free.
• Merged accounts that have more characters than allowed due to the merge will not lose any of them, but they will not be able to create another character until the count decreases.
• In the case of two guilds on both realms sharing the same name, the guild that was created earlier will keep its name, while the more recent one will receive a new name. After the merge, our Game Masters will offer a name change to the affected guilds, via the in-game ticket system.
• The account manager will be unavailable during the merge. We will also cancel every character auction right before the merge, and return every character to their original account.
• We recommend you to cancel all your in-game auctions and take everything from the mailbox before the merge. Tickets created before the merge will not be retained.
• All rules on the merged realm, including the allowed languages in channels, will be kept the same as for Athena now (see here).
• The merged realm will be keeping the 3x experience rate like it is now.
• The PvP season will be restarted on the new merged realm, so it all starts from scratch. All Arena teams will be disbanded. We will have saved the progress of the current Arena Season, and if there are worthy combatants, we will send them rewards.

Apollo Team