It might, with a smallish population, for a short while. I do believe they’ll die out after a few months when all the “new and fresh” players for various reasons either quit or change server.
I for one wont play on a fresh server. Even though I’m only a casual player these days I still have far to much invested in the few chars I have.
Yeah mostly this is the problem. Everybody who have been playing through Classic and TBCC has souvenirs, titles, reputations, ranks … that they do not want to lose by starting over. And even if you would roll fresh, it’s a Wrath server, which means that there are LOADS of things you cannot do anymore.
If I should prepare for Wrth Classic (I’m still not sure I’ll be playing it at all) , I would now level up some of my Classic-TBCC charaters to have them (with their unique titels/reps/possessions) ready for Wrath Classic.
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I think that is true for all servers though. I feel like first couple months of the expansion is always super hype, but then people start getting bored and they take breaks or quit, so naturally all servers start to lose players. Personally I’m not that bothered with what happens after a couple months, if I get a few months of enjoyment out of Wrath I’ll be happy with that.
You have the choice : play the game right now.
You don’t even need to raid just get some PvP gear + professions and you’re ready for WOTLK.
its only fresh for 90 days.
It is tempting, but 90 days of freshness is not “Fresh” per se…
i am going fresh but this gives me the chance to change my main dungeon role from dps to something else
Who ruined that server? 
I started playing during last phase of Vanilla Classic on a high populated realm. First few weeks of TBC it had more than 8k active raiders. Now it has barely 2000. It was great at start but as the phases progressed, the constant population decline started to be more and more noticeable. Three raiding guilds I’ve been in got disbanded due to lack of signups and insufficient recruitment which is pretty much impossible on small realms. PuGs (including GDKP ones) are rare because the population is not sufficient to fuel them. Yesterday, which was freaking sunday, a peak day, there was barely anyone to be found in Shattrath. This is a true hell I want never to experience again.
In the meantime, I transfered one of my alts to Gehennas and that was a whole different story. Teeming with life, chat spam was real (you must 100% get chat filter addon). But you’ll see constant guild recruitment even on discord and Blizz forums. And it’s a ton of guilds recruiting. Shattrath is full even during weekday mornings.
Anyone who discourages you from playing on a megaserver never tried a dead server. I (and basically anyone from dead servers) would take queues anytime over empty world with nobody to play with.
That’s why I won’t play Fresh. Blizzard proven to not invest a single penny into population management and Wotlk Classic will be no different. And the very same goes about Fresh. Heck, Blizzard even said they “will hope” for Fresh population to be stable instead of “we will do all we can to manage Fresh population”.
Fresh is a no go for me. Queues and GDKP with shady gold all the way over risking experiencing death of a realm again.
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me and my friends were excited but then realized we would have to relevel to 70 again which already took us quite a while last year so we are probably going to pass
shame because i would have personally loved being free of the inflated economy for a while at least
I would try it and see if it sticks or not.
That’s what I feared. A lot of people are just going to try it and see if it sticks. Unlike Blizzard, those players will be monitoring population status closely and on the slightest hint of population fall, mass panic might occur fueling the fall even further.
In short, if a Fresh server doesn’t turn into a megaserver in first few weeks, it’s pretty much condemned to slow death. TBC population data proven that.
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The reason I wanna go fresh is simply, the classic experience (for me) is more than the end game. The lvl’ing process used to be an adventure and i hope to see some of that again. Been lvl’ing on a couple of different tbcc servers and its the same everywhere. Near impossible to get an organic grp for low lvl dungeons, and without that youre kinda forced to only lvl through questing. Pained my soul having 5 quests for lets say SM and no grp to get em done. Im not a fan of getting boosted as i do find enjoyment in low lvl grp content. + every copper counts when youre just started your toon 
Gotta get them spells and mounts !!!
My hopes for fresh is to see ppl in the old world, get to do dungeons, elite quests etc. I dont mind grinding at a fast pace at all, but im that kind of dude who wants my professions to be caught up when going to a new lvl bracket. I might very well be disapointed but atleast i wanna give it a try.
I hope to see a lot of my fellow nerds when these new server unlocks
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That is correct. I have a main char on Gehennas so i will just explore 1 to 55 on a new server and if it sticks i might make a DK and see how it goes. Hope tho to find a community that is focused on no gdkp and no boost community where they all start on 1 server and mute or report bots and ppl that spam gdkps.
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You can’t enter same water in the river twice. You may remember the shoreline, but the water that was there is somewhere else. At least for me raiding in Classic - Cata is the new content, because I was a casual with 2-3h for about 4-5 days a week and many breaks, who skipped raiding at the most part.
Now with T1, T2, ZG (skipped T2,5 but saw it at the end of Classic in alt raid, skipped Naxx), T4, T5 and T6 behind I might say that it was a good experience. Right now I am having a small spring-summer break and just chilling on leveling Horde alts, but I like the competitiveness of end game and without it WoW wouldn’t be complete for me.
I will go fresh, even though I have lots of titles, gear, and worked really hard in tbc: Why?
Simple: All those things don’t matter. They have no value on their own. So many people are running around with Legendaries, boosted gladiator titles, and multiple gold caps. Keep in mind, that we are playing on legacy servers. The only thing, that counts, is FUN. Going fresh is FUN, so it’s worth it, and if problems occur, guess what: I can always reroll back to my old characters, since we won’t have much to do in phase 1 anyway.
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This is my nightmare. I tried playing at a full server, I logged in, saw Shattrath teeming with people, and logged off again in desperation.
We are different and have different preferences. It seems at least one of Blizz’s employees has gotten this:
From the US thread: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/thoughts-on-realm-consolidation/1263429/3
I totally agree. FUN is what it’s all about. Only our - not only yours and mine - ideas of what is FUN differs widely. I think getting the more obscure Achievements and titles to be fun, and this - for me - won’t be possible on a fresh server. I would love to go fresh - hopefully for the “small town” experience, Aggrend (whom I cite above) is talking about on the US forum - but not without my Arcanite Fishing Pole and my Brewfest Ram. For unlike you I think such things matter.
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No he hasn’t. You can leave Firemaw for free and settle on smaller realms if you wish for, but not the other way around. Isn’t that biased? I have a preference of being on Firemaw, but my
(and majority of players) preference is being actively rejected.
Why not allow every single player play where he wants to? Why only players who wants to play on smaller realms get attention?
This is patently not true. He actually has understood something about diversity of wishes. All the other talk about “Living communities” “viable servers” and so on - targetting PvP realms and mega servers. He’s the only one talking about people actually wanting to live on small servers.
I think that we all should have the right to “live” where we want to (given only certain limitations for faction balance and absolute number of players on any given realm) and I have said so on several occasions.
Free transfer is an extra. And it’s not that unfair not to have it any direction all the time. But I think now, with them shaking up the servers, they should open up for free transfer everywhere.
But as a PvP player you actually HAVE the choice of re-rolling on (or even paying for a transfer to) a low-pop realm if you should prefer this.
I, as a PvE player do not have this choice, or better said after August 10 I won’t any longer, as all 3 PvE English realms are full or High pop (heck, only low-pop is the Russian Хроми/Chromie).
I DID pay for a transfer back to the RP server Jydraxian Waterlords with my main after taking a FCT with my Guild to one of the other realms. I went back with open eyes, wanting low-pop, knowing the server etc. as my alts were still there.
Now the closing down of HW leaves me with no choice.
EDITED for clarifications and typos.
Will definitely not be going fReSh.
Since I’ll be playing the same char that I played in classic and tbc, there is absolutely no reason for me to throw all that work, unobtainable stuff and a great guild away.
The “novelty” with everyone leveling up and people beign poor will last what? 2 months?
Even if they do open transfers, I have no interest in paying to switch server just because. Should the server that I’m on (Gehennas) die or become unplayable somehow, I’ll evaluate the options but with no particular priority to the fresh ones.
People are sort of delusional … transfers or not, the fresh servers will get to the same point as all other servers long before wotlk gets near the end (assuming that they stay populated).
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