At the time of writing this post, Firemaw EU’s cluster on Classic Era has reached “High” population. This has been the result of a gradual push towards non-hardcore-specific Era realms over the last several months as many Classic players have begun to feel the vanilla itch. Slowly but surely Classic Era is beginning to thrive, with active guilds at endgame across multiple server clusters and plenty of new people leveling and doing dungeons on their way to 60.
If Blizzard was to do a fresh start realm, and presumably repeat the process every few years or so (assuming each fresh is successful enough), the characters are just going to end up on Era servers anyway. Why not then attempt to simulate a kind of seasonal content release schedule on Era realms in which every raid except MC/Ony is locked until a certain amount of time is passed, then release BWL and so on over time. I’ve read some comments on the forums about wanting the AQ war effort and scourge invasions to return as well, and there’s no reason why those couldn’t be enabled again as well when the time is right.
I’d like to address some pro’s and cons to this approach over completely new servers. One benefit is that players currently enjoying Era won’t feel like their recent efforts have been a waste. Consequently, players currently holding out for fresh will no longer have any reason to wait and can jump back in immediately, rapidly boosting Era’s population even further. Another advantage to this approach is that the “swarming locust” effect which has plagued unofficial servers over the years, in which players repeatedly scream for “fresh” only to abandon each new project after only a few months, would be completely eradicated. Our home would always be the same, and whether or not we want to play there would mainly be determined by which raid tier is the current one, rather than how old the server is.
There are however some potential cons to this approach, some of which are based in objective reality and others that are straight-up paradoxical in nature that I want to address. The first is the idea that it is essentially pointless to play on a “progressed” server because many of the people at endgame will severely outgear you, - as is the case currently in Era - especially with regards to PvP. The problem with this logic, however, is that it is applicable to any period of time in vanilla which is passed the initial launch stages, i.e. the first few months of phase 1. BWL is out? I guess there’s no point in playing the game now since I’ll get smacked by an orc warrior with ashkandi and full high warlord gear. AQ40 is out? Same deal but with Dark Edge of Insanity, and so on. The point is: Vanilla’s endgame is a linear progression system, which means you’ll always be behind others unless you’re there early on, and that’s okay because that’s how the game was designed, and you will catch up.
Another supposed problem I have seen brought up is the game’s economy: On Era servers, AH prices are much higher than they would be if we were to have fresh servers. This is a true statement that applies to all of the non-hardcore realms, but like the previous argument of progressed characters it is paradoxical: A fresh server’s economy is only smaller in scale because the vast majority of the population are unable to engage with it as much as max-level characters with gear (which allows them to better farm) are. If fresh servers were to happen, the economy would eventually go down the same path as Era servers currently are.
This kind of short-sighted approach to vanilla WoW is a recurring theme in arguments in favor of continuous fresh servers, and is in line with the previously-mentioned history of unofficial vanilla servers. Rather than deal with these inevitabilities that occur as the game progresses, proponents of constant fresh would rather see their new servers nuked endlessly to avoid these problems rather than address them once and for all. With the preservation and permanence of Era servers, Blizzard could actually attempt to address these problems, such as implementing regular gold-resets to stabilize the economy. Anyway, this is my long-winded way of saying that I think there’s more potential benefits of building off of Era than just doing fresh over and over, and that some of the arguments against the idea (that I’ve seen here on the forums) just make absolutely not sense when you follow them to their logical conclusion.