RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

The sure-fire way to get onto Balmung is to transfer in, which runs $20 (also note that while SE says you can't do this to locked servers, you can, in fact, do so). If you choose to transfer, also note that you can move multiple characters into the server at once for the same price if they're all coming from the same server. It may be worth making alts. That being said, I had a friend recently able to create a character on Balmung almost immediately after a server maintenance reset. Either of these will work!

I recently had to do this myself with a few friends about 2 weeks ago now. 

In any case, welcome to the community!