OCE has about 15k people on 3 servers. NA has about 180k. NA is getting 2 servers for a pop that is currently at 12 times the population of OCE. I guess you can make a fresh server for oce and after the dust settles have it sit at 1k pop.
Its either that or bliz has grossly underestimated the long term retension of fresh and NA needs 10 more servers. (Hint, they don’t)
puts hand up
Yes please, one more for Oce fresh
Make it happen, give us just 1 fresh OCE server
Totally floored by this! Me and a huge bunch of mates were all so keen to get back into WOTLK on a fresh server, and had not been preparing in TBC whatsoever. We’re not really sure what to do now being this far behind with gold inflation etc. Please reconsider Blizz! about 9 or 10 people super disappointed right now.
Yes, it isn’t just that they made this decision, it’s that they announced the decision only 3-4 days before prepatch. For many of us, if we’d known earlier we might have made alternative plans, done some intensive gold farming the last few weeks, etc. But this has completely pulled the rug out from under me.
Bring out one fresh PvP server for OCE, if there’s not enough interest to sustain it long term or at all, so be it, back to Arugal. No big deal.
If there’s no OCE fresh server we only stand to lose those who don’t want to play on non-fresh servers. I can’t blame them, as the gold inflation and rmt epidemic is not an appealing start for any returning player.
As an Oceanic player, I say “no, thank you”.
We saw how hard Oceanic SOM flopped. We simply don’t have the numbers to sustainably subdivide the community. As much as I would like otherwise.
It is a big deal. This is exactly how the community starts haemorrhaging: when servers become obsolete and people have the choice to play on a dead server or re-roll, and just end up quitting.
going to have to disagree with you, the fresh server would be populated by returning players, and those who feel behind the huge gold gap on established servers, Arugal would keeps its steady population because they have no need to re roll.
The only people missing out right now are those not currently playing tbc servers, which is a huge amount, WOTLK is also the biggest peak of wow expansions, so u can expect the most players to play, and keep playing during this expansion.
You can disagree all you want. Oceanic SOM is your case study of Oceanic Fresh.
SOM? how can u compare them? why would people with jobs and/or studying want to replay the most hardcore and time consuming version of WoW which we JUST completed going into bc? Wotlk is the best expansion ever created, and now we have a chance to play it with a balanced oceanic community, and you think its just going to fail without giving it a chance? there are more reasons to give it a shot then to just outright deny it
It’s hard to compare the most popular and successful expansion to a re-re-release with a bunch of changes no one wanted. SoM flopped as a whole for numerous reasons, not one of them being how many people were playing it. Even the Oceanic realm was active enough for multiple raiding guilds. I was in one.
Because all the reasons you listed about a fresh start apply exactly to what SOM was meant to offer.
That may be the way you feel but that’s ultimately just a value proposition. Unless you can give some concrete evidence to suggest why Oceanic Fresh would perform better than Oceanic SOM, the evidence speaks for itself. Unfortunately, I might add, as I like the theory of Oceanic Fresh.
I agree, they’re not 100% comparable but I suspect both appeal broadly to the same demographic - people who love vanilla WoW and feel like they missed the boat.
As Classic has shown us, just because WOTLK was popular 15 years ago doesn’t mean it still will be today. I’m sure there are returning players just for WOTLK, I just don’t think there will be enough to sustain a bespoke community - SOM as case in point.
SOM is a horrible argument for not making a wrath fresh OCE server lol
I acknowledge the comparison is not perfect but it is apt for the reasons provided.
It provides a baseline for how strained the Oceanic Classic community is (already spread across TBC Classic, SOM, Classic Era, and US servers) and how hard it is to sustainability subdivide the community further.
I agree that WOTLK has more appeal to returning players than SOM but does it have enough to mitigate the trainwreck that was Oceanic SOM? I’m doubtful.
I mean, yes and no. The main difference being people who missed Classic and tried SoM got a twisted version of it with much harder raids where if you weren’t farming herbs for hours a day you’d never have consumables to get through even MC.
SoM was bustling for the first couple months. It wasn’t until people got to the endgame and experienced all the changes that they started to drop off massively. PvP ranking from day one killed the dungeon gearing step as people could realistically get R14 in about 6 weeks with the sped up ranks. And all the raid buffs meant things like Fire and Arcane prot pots were absolute necessities for the easiest fights. Hell you needed FROST pots for Firemaw…
People coming back for Wrath will get exactly that. Exactly what they remember playing (with a bad Wintergrasp, albeit) and will stick around past the first month. Sure there’s always a drop after initial hype dies, but if anything SoM proves that servers can remain active with only a few hundred people. There’s 2100 active raiders across 4 SoM servers, if that’s justifiable then so is OCE Fresh.
I was coming back to wow for a fresh server classic experience. I wontbe getting back on if theyre just established servers
Extremely disappointing. Myself and my group of friends have been looking forward to re-subbing to wow for a fresh oceanic wotlk server (a group of 10 of us), likely none of us will play now if there is no fresh server.
Where is the harm in opening even just 1 fresh server, and if the server dies out, merge it with an established server after a few months? It’s seriously mind boggling to me. I seriously hope they reconsider and give us a fresh oceanic server.
They only added the PvE fresh after the feedback from the annoucement (which was early AM for OCE).
Hopefully they come back monday with an OCE fresh annoucement from all the feedback after OCE woke up to the news
Those people wanted to play Classic fresh, not TBC. And there weren’t enough of them in OCE which is unfortunate but expected. How many of them do you think came back to TBC and are still here?
Or they transfer to the existing realms if/when the fresh server collapses. How does one server full of people who didn’t want to play non-fresh anyway, folding back into existing servers going to haemorrhage the current OCE population?