New Fresh Start Realms with Wrath Classic

With the launch of the Wrath of the Lich King Classic pre-patch, we intend to open “Fresh Start” realms for players who wish to experience starting a new character and playing alongside a new community of others.

In addition to fulfilling a request we’ve heard from players for a long time, we expect there to be a lot of new Classic players joining us for the first time in Wrath of the Lich King, and some of them may be concerned that they’ll feel behind. Fresh Start realms should give those players a chance to feel as though they’re on an even playing field with everyone else.

These realms will be Wrath of the Lich King Classic realms from day one, so when they launch, they’ll have all of the talent trees and player abilities coming with Wrath of the Lich King Classic, but all players will start new characters at level 1. Fresh Start realms will also come with a few stipulations:

  • For at least 90 days, you will not be allowed to boost a character on Fresh Start realms.
  • For at least 90 days, Fresh Start realms will not be available destinations for character transfers.
  • Death Knights cannot be created on these realms without a level 55 character on that same realm.

All of the WoW Classic and Burning Crusade dungeons and zones will be unlocked and available on these realms. On all realms, Northrend will be locked until Wrath’s official launch day.

As a reminder, this is one of several steps we’re taking over the next few months to prepare for Wrath Classic:

  • PvE to PvP transfer restrictions removed*
  • Wrath Classic closed beta test
  • Classic Era clone service retired
  • Existing realms consolidated**
  • New Fresh Start Realms with Wrath Classic pre-patch
  • Wrath of the Lich King launch

*This will include the removal of the restriction on having characters of both factions on a PvP realm.

**Before we consolidate realms, we’re going to remove the restriction on the number of characters you can create on each realm, up to the limit of 50 characters per account.

Ultimately, we hope to see players spread out onto all of the available realms as Wrath of the Lich King Classic approaches. For players looking for a chance at faction balance, we’re hopeful that by starting fresh, they’ll have a chance to stay balanced for a long time. For players looking for a chance to level up in dungeons, we hope the presence of other leveling players makes that more likely.

We’re excited about all of this, and we hope you’re excited about it too. We’ll see you in Azeroth!

227 Likes

Cool!

34 Likes

how are you going to say you want people to spread out, while at the same time are deleting around 22 realms from the list?

17 Likes

What took you so long?

15 Likes

Well this made it absolutely pointless. Those who are excited for Wrath are already preparing to level, or will be just making a 70 boost to begin there.

90 days til someone with loads of RMT transfers over to flex.

If Blizzard does not put in measures to prevent this, they WILL just say “X server is the Alliance server. Y server is the Horde server”, and they’ll just dogpile it.

Measures need to be put in.

95 Likes

This is great news.

Thanks so much : )

10 Likes

Called it.

Even Blizzard knows this in-game economy is way out of hand for new players who want to come back for WOTLK classic.

23 Likes

F R E S H gamers unite

24 Likes

If you’re gonna create new fresh servers, you guys gotta implement some kind of faction lock on these fresh PVP servers.

Don’t let the ~20 servers who died due to no balancing go to waste.

EDIT: Also are yall gonna implement name changes? Seen some talk on Twitter about it from devs.

35 Likes

90% of those realms have 0-10 playin on them at any given time… the rest have so low of a pop that its essentially impossible to do anything bigger than 10 man content

6 Likes

This is great for the people looking for this kind of experience, thanks!

17 Likes

Nice…
that’s cool thing to hear

5 Likes

single faction fresh pvp server RTA lets goooo !

3 Likes

Agree, with Drooler. You cant open up the server for transfers. 90 days is nothing. People will just transfer all kind of crap into that server. It’ll be a fun time for 90 days, then blam influx of crap from outside economy.

65 Likes

Seems weird to create new fresh servers, but then allow people to xfer to these realms. Kinda beats the point of having a fresh realm

104 Likes

Very nice but…

This is the one thing I have issues with.
The moment those 90 days are over, people will transfer their other characters with massive amount of gold they collected from the rampant gold selling in TBCC to this new fresh server and effectively inject millions of gold into the economy and ruin that server economy the same way every other servers economy were ruined.

I can only see two ways to deal with this:

  1. Never allow character transfers to that server.
  2. Fix the inflated gold on every other servers before that 90 days is over.
242 Likes

These servers are DOA.

9 Likes

Pretty sure there is still the 5k gold xfer cap unless they change it for wrath. I guess they can xfer a ton of mats to sell though.

I’m 100% for not letting anyone xfer to them.

30 Likes

Please, for the love of god heavily moderate these new servers so the bots and gold farmers don’t completely destroy the economy again.

36 Likes

They will. They’ll probably buy up everything they can hold on their old server, then come to the ‘fresh’ and flood it the AH and crash prices.

17 Likes