As I ran through the halls of the Chaos Sanctuary for maybe the 1000th playthrough of Diablo 2 on my new level 82 elemental druid, it hit me that this is the year 2017 and I'm still playing, and greatly enjoying for that matter, a game that came out in the year 2000. This realization really got me thinking about why it is that I'm playing and enjoying a 17 year old game and the answer was clear: the ladder reset.

My friends and I every couple years come back to Diablo 2 to grind through new characters and attempt to obtain the best gear in the game, once we get the itch to play again and there is a new ladder reset. What I have realized is that it is solely this ladder reset that gets us to come back and play again. This ladder reset puts everyone on equal footing while also resetting the entire loot economy of the game, as the item hunt is the essential driving factor to play Diablo. As the ladder goes on, the economy becomes more and more saturated with loot until it gets to the point to where you can obtain all the best gear of the game for free, ruining the entire grind and point of the game. This reset gets everyone blood thirsty to go on hours and hours of item hunt grinds to find that HOZ or Jah Rune.While thinking all this through running through the halls of the Chaos Sanctuary, a thought came to me. Why doesn’t World of Warcraft implement a similar ladder, or reset system to get players to return in a form of a reset realm/server?

I understand opening up legacy servers has been a main topic of conversation for years, but legacy servers come with many drawbacks and technical issues. Here’s my idea for an alternative to legacy servers: for Blizzard to open up a server, or group of servers, where everyone has to start from scratch. No level boosts, no heirlooms, nothing. Also, no current characters can be transferred into these servers.

Here’s the catch though: once you get to level 60, you must complete either all raid content, or the top raid to continue to progress through the game to continue to level again and start your journey to 70.(not sure which idea would be better.) Then once you hit level 70, you must do the same thing, completing the raids up until the Black Temple, or the Sunwell to begin your journey to level 80 and so on and so forth.
What this server or servers will do is give everyone a fresh new start to the game, with a fresh economy, and a world that is extremely populated and gives you an experience like so many had when they first started playing, with the new modern game systems in place and without the technical headache for Blizzard having to open legacy servers with old builds of the game.

I believe this is an easier and better alternative to legacy servers for World of Warcraft that will give players a similar experience to when they first started playing the game that would, technically speaking, be easiest for Blizzard to implement, and would substantially drive up subscriber numbers, especially in an in-between expansion period. I’m sure this system has multiple problems and issues I have yet to think of, but I believe it is an idea very much worth exploring. Thanks for reading.