Idea for an experimental server

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If the game does well enough for this to be a serious thing, maybe it could be a little different within the same idea.

Every year, each region gets one new server.

This is pointless if you considered the mausoleum part important, of course.

But if they made a big enough deal 'marketing wise' about 'new server, experience a fresh new version of Verra' and all that, maybe old players would make enough alts on that server to join the new players, for it to be good.

And if they wouldn't, then it doesn't seem likely that the yearly resetting server would serve much purpose other than creating a 'race for top content' amidst a few people.

I think newer players might be more interested in joining a fresh server if they knew that they could keep it, and unlike other older games where you could usually 'just server transfer at the end of a server like this', Ashes is about building up actual tangible places via your community, so just 'moving to another server where none of that exists' seems like it might be insufficiently appealing to draw a larger crowd?

I am consistently surprised by human motivations though, so I'll hope to learn something in this thread too.

I would start by asking "why?" and I am asking genuinely. What is the desire behind it?

If the wish behind it is to experience what it was like during the time when the world was fresh and just being colonized, this could be controlled via population numbers on servers relative to node numbers. I mean, you're obviously gonna get big cities, centers of commerce etc, but you're also going to get 'the borderlands', the wilderness, areas at the edge of civilization where nodes aren't even crossroads yet. If you make sure nodes have a minor decay rate if left unattended and you control how many people there are per server, you will probably always have 'the borderlands' where anyone can experience that fresh start feeling.

If this is simply a desire for competition in the sense of starting over from a level playing field, I think one could do something less drastic than a new server. You could have periodic "war camps" spawning to fight the Corruption in particularly bad areas. You could join these and your level in them would be separate from the rest of the game. You'd get a few different small camps that you competed over to get them to have the architecture you want while you do corruption related content. And after a time, the war camp "moves on" (that is to say, you get a reset).

However, if the wish is to be able to experience the world with your high level friends and not feel like you got left behind by joining late, or allow high level people to relive their nostalgia of earlier days (or test their skills again), then this is my chance to suggest we get level capping into the game! Being a level 90 player who can level cap to 40 to join their friends for a dungeon they love sounds like a lot of fun and it seems like it would help with some of the feeling of missing out if you join later.
In fact, regardless of anything else, pls give us this Intrepid! I want to experience your cool content again! (without being overleveled)