As someone who was here since the start of the original Elysium realm, who saw the Nost merge that disbanded the guild I was in and permanently separated me from dozens of friends by renaming all of us, and who eventually had their characters taken away right as they were starting to make new friends -- I want to explain that this news isn't going to magically revitalize the community with a flood of returning players. I'm personally extremely apprehensive of returning now when I feel any characters I spend time and effort into leveling could arbitrarily be shelved again at the slightest whim. I could have rerolled at any point but I was too afraid it would happen to those characters at some point as well. My trust was broken not once but twice, with no warning. No warning so we could not fill our bags with loot, but no warning for us to collect contact info for our friends, either. The windows were far too short for that.
I wouldn't expect even a third of recovered characters to be played, to be completely honest. These restored characters will be renamed and socially cut off just as they were when the Nost merge happened. There is a niche for people to want to play these restored characters, but I assume most people who stuck around have already replayed those exact same classes to even higher levels.
I apologize for showing up just to be negative, but I'm afraid I won't be rerolling with you guys until the BC launch, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that sentiment. As strange as this sounds, you might want to consider a fresh BC realm with all the vanilla raids open at the start -- that's the only thing that's really going to pull in members like me who left when faced with rerolling as our only option.
