RerollLocusts
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Some thoughts on re-rolling
Like many that read WoW Insider, I've been playing World of Warcraft pretty much since release. Many people I know who've been playing that long have spent all of their time on one server. Mine has been spent with my guild, running up one of various characters to endgame. Raiding. Fun faction farming like Thorium Brotherhood, Argent Dawn, or Timbermaw Furbolgs. (I can hear your yawns of excitement now!) Then Burning Crusade came out, and I thought to myself... "Aha! Something new to do." Now I'm running my Druid and Mage up to L70, having run my Rogue up, and my guild is starting to look at running alts through Kara. And I'm farming rep again, only this time it's Lower City and Thrallmar and I think I even have faction with someones best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night... So when we opened up the It came from the Blog guild on Zangarmarsh, I jumped in with both feet for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to run a Rogue up so that I had a testing ground to play with maces and daggers and fist weapons and not just my beloved Swords. After all, if I'm going to help bring a good quality Rogue column to the Rogue community, I should be running the builds for myself. The second reason is because since Burning Crusade has come out, there have been huge calls for more new realms so people can run from 1-70 on them, fresh. I figured I'd see what it was like to seriously try to run a new character up after 2 1/2 years of playing the game on the same server with the same people, and a pile of gold just one in-game-mail away.
The plague of the reroll locusts
If you ever visit the WoW forums on a daily basis, you'll notice that a large portion of the posts are people asking, begging, wheedling and whining about their wish for new servers. These posts have gotten so bad that Blizzard has now classified "new server plz" posts as spam and threatened to ban posters from the forums. But even so, you can see "Are there new servers today?!?!?!?!", "New realms: Why they are needed" and "Perfect time to release new realms!" Blizzard has said that they don't plan to release any new realms until the current servers are overpopulated -- and with the large number of "dying" low-pop realms, this doesn't seem to be on the agenda anytime soon. But many of the rerollers say they don't care that newly released realms will become low-population -- they just want a "fresh start" so they can get server firsts. Devonw, who starts a number of the threads, has rerolled seven times on new servers, oddly enough with mostly night elf females. This has led to the popularization of the term "reroll locusts." The locusts demand a new server to start anew on, roll a character there, and in a few months when it becomes a low-population server, desert en masse to call for yet another new server, leaving the old server a barren wasteland. I've got to say that the attitude of many of the reroll locusts has turned me off from supporting their cause. They don't seem to care about any of the low-population realms desperately in need of players, but only about their own need for a new playing field. I do understand the fun of starting out on a brand-new realm, having tried it once myself in the past, but I think Blizzard really has to balance that against concern for the low-population realms, and they've decided in favor of the latter. What do you think should be done about new realms and low population realms? Do you support new servers, or do you wish the threads would just go away?
