TLDR: Introduce seasons to Classic and fix a bunch of issues at once.
As the timeline of Classic has run its course, the question arises of what to do with it. Sure, TBC is coming around soon, but that doesn’t really solve the problems of fully progressed classic realms.
Some observations:
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Players tend to prefer relatively fresh realms to near fully progressed ones in terms of starting a new character from scratch. This can be seen in the behaviour of vanilla players from before official Classic, and right now in projects such as Fresh Crusade, which brought about 5k players onto a dead server with 0 raiding guilds, as can be seen on wowclassicpopulation (Dragonfang realm, check last seen @7 days, levels 6-40 for fresh players).
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Players are willing to start over if everyone else has to, as well. When new servers pop up, the rule of thumb is that players will start there, but those servers also tend to attract players who are already playing that particular expansion elsewhere, but are not as happy with their server as they would like to be. This could easily be observed before official classic turned up and can be seen in players rerolling on new realms before transfers were available.
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Fully progressed servers let players skip through content and mainly focus on the end of the endgame right from the start, a simple consequence of everyone else already being that far ahead. Therefore, the game cannot be fully experienced if one starts fresh on a fully progressed realm with an active community.
These problems are not unique to WoW Classic, however. The same situation will present itself once TBC has progressed far enough, and any later expansion as well. So, what to do about this?
The good part is that Blizzard has already solved this very problem, just in a different game: Diablo III. In Diablo, seasons come and go, and a character is either in-season or out-of-season, and any in-season characters become out-of-season-characters at the end of that season. The only way to have a character be in-season is to create it as such. I believe this model to be what WoW Classic needs. To elaborate, this means the following:
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Introduce seasons to Classic. Every new season, new servers are created and everyone who plays on them starts from scratch. The servers never progress into TBC and have a finite lifetime (the end of their season).
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At the end of a season, when those servers necessarily start to die out, characters are transferred to large, non-season reservoir type servers. This is mainly meant to make sure that players don’t find themselves on deserted servers, able to login to their characters but unable to meaningfully play them. Those servers could be one large mega-server per region or several larger servers, all they need to be is large enough to keep an active community.
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There could be the possibility of a transfer/copy into TBC once per character, possibly at the end of a given season or just anytime.
The demand for regular fresh servers is there, and this would be an elegant way of keeping those available. At the same time, it shows the way forward as to what Classic+ might look like: Every season could have a no-changes variant and a Classic+ variant of servers available. The former would be just Classic as it has been the first time around, as true to the original as possible. Classic+ however could be similar to the way they implemented it in Diablo III, i.e. introducing changes to class balance, itemization and boss mechanics, including their difficulty. For example, there could be some more retribution paladin gear, Moonkins could be made more viable by tweaking some numbers, etc.
The details of this could be argued about, for example it is not quite clear how a Classic+ character might be merged into a realm with characters that didn’t have the changed itemization. The solution is probably different reservoirs for no-changes and Classic+ characters.