World of Warcraft Classic: The Burning Crusade is currently in the last tier of the expansion and the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, has been announced. Blizzard announced in a blue post on its forums that fresh realms will be added with the release of the Wrath of the Lich King pre-patch.
World of Warcraft Classic launched on August 19, 2019 to swarms of players excited to journey through the original iteration of the game. World of Warcraft Classic is currently on its first expansion, The Burning Crusade. On April 19, 2022 the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, was officially announced by Blizzard.
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The closed Beta of World of Warcraft Classic: Wrath of the Lich King is expected to begin in the summer of 2022. In a blue post on Blizzard forums, developer Kaivax states "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." All Classic and The Burning Crusade zones and dungeons will be available for players to level through together but the newest continent, Northrend, will be fully locked until the official release of Wrath of the Lich King. Players on these fresh servers will also be unable to create a Death Knight unless they already have a level 55 character on the server.
There is currently no set date for the Wrath of the Lich King pre-patch. World of Warcraft Classic has been struggling with faction balance on servers since the beginning and that issue has only been exasperated in The Burning Crusade. all about private wow servers The addition of fresh realms will allow players who want to return specifically for Wrath of the Lich King to do so without being at a massive disadvantage compared to veterans of World of Warcraft Classic. Speculation about Wrath of the Lich King has been rampant within the community since the release of World of Warcraft Classic: Season of Mastery.
Because players will also be unable to boost or transfer characters to these realms for 90 days it's clear that Blizzard's intent is to create a community for returning players. It will also give players a chance who want to level "alt" characters of a different faction a place to do so without being forced to do it at a massive disadvantage on already heavily populated servers. Blizzard recently announced that it will be merging realms on the North American and European Server groups in an attempt to combat this faction imbalance problem.
Many players could see this as counter-intuitive, however. With faction imbalance and dying servers rampant on World of Warcraft Classic: The Burning Crusade, adding more realms might only fuel the problem that Blizzard has only recently tried to correct. There's no guarantee that these servers won't be imbalanced themselves or eventually die out on their own. It's very likely that players will be leveling on these fresh servers to pass the time until the release, and then simply return to their main servers.