Hello Australia,
We’re going to start with an apologies, as you are now well aware, Maladath (AU) has become Maladath (distinctly US). This wasn’t meant to come as a surprise on patch day, instead being part of our announced patch changes ahead of time but it was missed and that is entirely on us.
So, belatedly let’s quickly fill in on the why, and what’s next.
When we looked at populations for Classic Anniversary toward the end of Vanilla it was clear that Maladath (AU) had fallen critically low as most players had opted to play on the massively larger US realms. From a Server & Live standpoint when we were making our new environments for Classic Anniversary to live on and progress to Burning Crusade it did not make sense to build out an additional AU environment to support such a small, and still shrinking realm. So we came to the decision as we have done in Season of Mastery, Season of Discovery and Mists of Pandaria Classic, to close the realm to new character creation and open Free Character Transfers to larger US realms. Since we were not rebuilding a new AU site, we needed people to be able to still access Maladath to transfer off, so we hooked some US hardware up to the Australian database (which, between you and I is bonkers that we have a realm running with a database connection the other side of the planet) so that people could still exit the realm.
None of this was meant to be a surprise, and we’re extremely sorry for the communication breakdown.
Where does that leave us? With the new Burning Crusade Classic client that everyone should have just patched onto, Free Character Moves are now enabled and functioning once again on Maladath, and you can transfer to either the PvP or PvE US realms. Maladath will remain available, you do not need to rush if you need to plan moves with guilds, friends etc. Maladath will remain running in it’s hybrid US/AU setup for the foreseeable future.
Thank you as always, and we hope you enjoy the significantly more vibrant scene that awaits you on Dreamscythe or Nightslayer.