I’ve seen a lot of vitriol towards the idea of Fresh on these forums, which I think is a bit misguided and or misinformed. Let me explain a little bit about Fresh, and why I think its a good thing.
What Fresh is:
Put simply, it is about experiencing the progression of an expansion through its phases in a wiped economy.
What Fresh is not:
Wanting a new server because you are behind in levels.
Wanting a new server because you missed out on a raid tier.
Wanting a new server because there is a current lull between phases.
ONLY for Classic.
Hatred towards Eternal Classic.
One of the biggest misconceptions about Fresh I see is thinking it’s just for Classic servers. I think a lot of the hate towards Fresh comes from TBC or Wotlk friends thinking Fresh is a Classic exclusive idea that only benefits Classic, and harms the populations of the others. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In my opinion Fresh Seasonal servers are THE only way legacy content ((of any era)) can survive when the last phase rolls out and progression comes to a close.
Another misconception is that Fresh servers will kill the Eternal servers. It’s sad to say but Eternal servers will die on their own with no help needed. This goes for all three eras. Sadly when the content ends and there is no progression, its only a matter of time until the player base dwindles. And as we saw with Classic, that happened very quickly.
"Yes but Fresh realms will just die one day as well. What’s the point?"
You are very correct. That is why my hope is that Blizzard would implement Seasonal Fresh servers. You would experience your chosen expansion’s phases as usual, but when the last phase has come and gone the servers would reset to the first phase. That way all eras of classic could continue on 10 years from now, similar to Diablo 2. And when the last phase rolls out your character will be moved to the Eternal Classic realms, so you will be able to keep them forever.
The final thing I want you to take away from this is that Fresh Seasonal servers benefits you whether you hate Classic and love Wrath or any combination of the three. Sadly they will all be dead very quickly after their last phase has rolled out if we don’t push Blizzard to implement Fresh Seasonal servers
We fought against the “wall of no” and begged Blizzard for years against the naysayers. Don’t let the hobby and classic experience we waited so long for die because of misinformed tribalism.
Would you say that the portion of the playerbase interested in fresh is also interested in the immersive aspects of the original game as opposed to others who are more interested in p2w and/or hurrying past content?
I mean, it’s not a hard concept. EverQuest has TLP Servers that are essentially what people want when they say “fresh”: the servers cycle. The main difference is that the TLP servers are on an extended release so you get expansions every few months; basically imagine if you had a fresh server but everything was unlocked already without phases and in five months it would advance to TBC, which would also unlock with everything available and then in 5 months you get Wrath, and so on. That style wouldn’t work for a WoW but it gives you an idea how they operate.
So we had vanilla realms, they progress to TBC. New servers are opened that start at vanilla. Later those servers move to TBC (and TBC would have moved to wrath) and the cycle repeats. You always make a fresh vanilla server (at least one) each expansion cycle, basically, that goes back up through expansions.
I think they will fail and I have no interest in playing on them BUT I don’t care if Blizzard makes FRESH realms. You do NOT have to convince me, you need to convince Blizzard. IF Blizzard thought they would be popular they would make them.
Maybe try another FRESH reroll on a dead server to show Blizzard that you have the numbers AND the stamina to make it worth their while.
Blizzard is not going to make excessive unnecessary realms just because you want one. People asking for fresh realms are only looking at the short term or only care about themselves. Blizzard looks at the bigger picture. Dividing out the playerbase across unnecessary realms is just stupid for a MMO. What you are then left with is empty realms that now need to be merged up. If we made a fresh realm every time someone asked for it; there would be hundreds of realms and most of them would be empty.
Maybe after crusade/wrath have run their course Blizzard might consider fresh realms again. But until then… really doubt it.
Stop it, only reason it exists is anti-boost mentality. There’s a demand outside of anti-boost for it but its the exception and not the rule.
Put simply, its a bandwagoned movement to protest the boost.
It’s something that never existed in TBC
It’s also something that’s private server specific
It’s something that only picks up a little steam via hype and drops off once the leveling is done.
A long term server for population health
A good forum thread
Only if it kills the seasonal server completely and transfers the characters to specific servers with faction disparities to help with server health of other servers ruined by imbalanced transfers with no restrictions.
Seasonal Server —> Season ends —> Ally xfer to horde dominated server (not their choice)
Seasonal Server —> Season ends —> Horde xfer to ally dominated server (not their choice)
Seasonal Server is wiped clean for another season.
There was a fresh classic server that came out 2 years ago and won game of the year. And there are fresh tbc servers that are 1 week old. Expect more in the future.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you but I don’t think we should declare Classic dead until TBC has been out for a few months. Give people a chance to drift back if they are so inclined.
I think the biggest problem with fresh is. What happens when those fresh are at their end?
Do we constantly just open more and more servers, that end up dead with little to no one on when it is at the end of its cycle - or do they just delete the server (thus your character with it) to start fresh again.
Either option really would be a buzzkill for someone and not a smart business move.
They would have to force transfer all characters off all classic realms into 1 and then delete all other classic realms and then re-open new with fresh. But you know how big a headache it would be to A) successfully force transfer all remaining classic characters to a single realm. B) The effort to watch multiple servers now for bugs and issues. C) The value would be low. Classic worked because a lot of people wanted to experience it for the first time or once more. Those people are done with it and moved on. You won’t get a large population to keep cycling through classic.