I’d like to share an idea for how Blizzard can launch a fresh realm every year, yet no chars are lost, the community population isn’t divided too thin, average count of online players remains high, new players can play with old, and everyone ends up in the same place able to play together forever.

Here’s how it could work:

• This summer, Wow Classic launches with 10-50 realms (rather than 200+ realms like retail).
• For discussion purposes, let’s say Wow Classic releases on Aug 1 2019 (in Phase 1 of its 6 content phases) and a new phase launches every 6 months.
• On Feb 1 2019, Phase 2 launches.
• When the 3rd phase launches (1 year after release, so August 1 2020), a new Dimension of each realm is born which starts back at phase 1. (So if you want a new char, you pick for example Mal’Ganis realm, then you either select the old dimension which is currently phase 3 or the new dimension which is currently phase 1)
• Fast forward another year, on Aug 1 2021, the original dimension enters phase 5 and the other newer dimension enters phase 3. On this day, a third dimension is born. So if you roll a new char, you pick from 3 dimensions: a fresh one, a mid, or one with almost all content available.
• Fast forward another year. The oldest Dimension has been in Phase 6 for six months; on this day, Aug 1 2022, that oldest Dimension becomes Eternal, meaning suddenly the population of that Dimension collapses into a single dimension that lasts forever, unchanged.

The benefits of 3 Dimensions + Eternal:

• You never lose your chars.
• There is always a fresh realm every single year in August.
• The community population isn’t divided too thin (there is only ever 3 dimensions + eternal).
• Any new char can pick Eternal from the start if they want to join friends who don’t feel like starting fresh.
• No matter what dimension you roll on, everyone on the realm will end up together on Eternal.

Also posted here: https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/com ... _together/

But would people in later phases be able to play with those in earlier phases? If not, then I'm not sure there's really a point to this, you may as well just launch seperate servers then merge them at a pre-mediated date. Reading this through with all the information is hard enough, I can't imagine a general user stumbling upon this system is likely to 'get it'.

Also on a personal opinion side, I don't think Vanilla really needs to be repeteadly recycled especially if nothing new is happening each time. Fresh only stays 'fresh' for so long before people get bored of re-doing the same thing over and over.

Solveig wrote: ↑

5 years ago

But would people in later phases be able to play with those in earlier phases? If not, then I'm not sure there's really a point to this, you may as well just launch seperate servers then merge them at a pre-mediated date. Reading this through with all the information is hard enough, I can't imagine a general user stumbling upon this system is likely to 'get it'.

Also on a personal opinion side, I don't think Vanilla really needs to be repeteadly recycled especially if nothing new is happening each time. Fresh only stays 'fresh' for so long before people get bored of re-doing the same thing over and over.

It's a terrible idea.
Edit: The like was unintentional.

1) You know about the F R E S H meme of private servers? The players who fall behind the crowd when a new server launches or take some kind of break, when they return they see that they're not on par with the most dedicated players on the server so they're craving for a F R E S H start somewhere else because they feel they've been left behind? This is exactly what it would be like. It's silly and the only thing that will happen is the same thing that is happening now - the population will thin out over the span of many small servers. We have seen this happen with the K3 and Northdale launches.

2) Collapsing realms is a bad, bad idea. It screws up with names, guild names, the economy, and so forth. Think people saving up names and holding them up for ransom. Think someone who is R12 on a server being pushed back to R8 after a merge. We have seen this happen with the merge between Zeth'Kur and Elysium servers.

3) New players joining will always pick the F R E S H realms because it makes sense to them and not many players understand the difference between patch 1.2 and patch 1.5. Any server needs a constant influx of new players in order to survive, because there will always be a constant influx of old players leaving. The result would be that the oldest realms will tend to die out over time. We have seen this happen with the server Anathema on Elysium, which was re-launched at a later patch with characters imported from Nostalrius.