Title. Saw this for WotLKC and thought it would be interesting for retail. Sorta starting a server from scratch with no boosts or transfers, fresh economy… I assume the account wide stuff would have to stay like Mounts/Mog’s etc. Hmm, maybe it wouldn’t work, but neat idea.
Thoughts?
God, I really wish I didn’t have those.
Pick one of the dead realms, join it.
There you go. Fresh start realm.
Would have to be isolated. I’m sure some people would play on it.
it only really works in classic because realm identity has meaning in classic. That concept has pretty much been removed from retail.
With part of the AH region wide now it’d be impossible to have fresh start servers for retail without some serious work put into making it only partially blocked off from other servers (like being able to queue for dungeons/battlegrounds but not have the merged AH).
Don’t think it’d have a population very long either since there isn’t much to keep people around and most things can be completed fairly quickly these days.
Roll a new blizz account and you’ll see how stark fresh is for retail vs classic.
So much meaning people jump on the transfer train to high pop servers with their factions as top king.
Realms mean just as much in Classic as they do in retail : people go where they can to get groups to play the game.
In retail, me being on Proudmoore and you on Stormrage does not prevent us from grouping or playing together. In classic, it does.
Which is exactly why realms mean nothing on Classic. People jump ship the minute they see a few less peeps in IF or Org.
On retail, you can have some “pride” in your server community since it won’t prevent you from doing content.
Either way, fresh retail would fail because it would either: have CRZ, region AH, and cross server play, which would defeat the point of fresh, or not have any of that, in which case nobody would play it.
Agreed.
To answer the title, no. It’s not possible.
It would need an accelerated timeline to make it work. It’s would never be the same as it was, that’s not a classic version of retail.
If it wouldn’t be the same, why bother?
It’s neat to think newer folks could get the full sense of the game eras, though. 
Absolutely not.
This is why WoW has over 240 servers and most of them are Dead, Dead, Dead.
Back in Wrath, Blizzard kept adding server after server after server, long after population growth had stagnated.
Why did Blizzard keep adding servers?
Because of requests like this. "I want a new server where I’LL be the most important person!’
Of course, the people asking for those servers were never the most important person. And we ended up with a couple hundred dead realms as a result.
Stupid idea that Blizzard should NEVER have caved in to.
It would be a waste of $ - why would they make 2 versions of classic?
Since the entire game is cross real except early mythic raids I don’t think this would work very well in retail.
Once they come to their senses and make cross realm guilds and mythic cross realm always there will be no real reason to even have servers other than character names.
That’s called creating a new character.
The best part of fresh start realms is the buzz. Characters of all levels everywhere you look, you’re no longer one of the two players in the zones you’re leveling in. It’s really fun and invigorating in a way that old servers rarely are, and for the first few months it feels like a big piece of the game’s soul has been restored.
Unfortunately I doubt we’ll see any for retail though, at least not until they merge down some of the existing dead servers.
Sure as long as they remove all realm first achievements from it
Nah, if Blizz were being completely honest they should be consolidating and getting rid of servers not adding more.