As above. You're hooped until they take more measures to allow more people to play the game, versus those that apparently never log out so they don't have to worry about logging in.. etc.

And it's too bad that they were in another area. It's not like some games that you can create if you had another character there, it's a all ban on character creation. But you could have done paladin from where you were and met up with them somehow. Pointer for next time though