Well, there’s no world quests and no mythics. The players that hit the cap in a day are generally the first to start complaining that there is “nothing to do” as they had to rush to the cap on day one and literally have no one to do heroics with as they have to wait for others to catch up and get past the item level gate. The raid isn’t going to be open for 2-3 weeks as is usually the case, and the PvP season will be starting around the same time.
Anyone trying to say those three extra days are going to be a huge advantage is living in a fantasy world and really has no idea what a true “pay to win” system even entails. At BEST, you’ll have people that might cap off on professions who will control the AH for about a week with severely overpriced crafted items and mats, but that’s honestly no different from the first week of ANY expansion. The prices will come down in short order as more people start farming and flooding the market with more affordable mats while the people with more gold than sense pay a premium to power level their crafting professions.
These people are freaking out about nothing as the various pre-existing time gates, as well as the early access restrictions and limited player pool are going to even things out considerably. Anyone still complaining about the “tHrEe ExTrA dAyS!!!11one” is likely someone that was never going to be ready for day one of raiding/ranked PvP anyway.
In fact, I’ll straight up call them NPCs stuck on a loop. All they keep doing at this point when you try to explain any of this to them is shout “BUT THE THREE EXTRA DAYS IS A MAJOR ADVANTAGE!” when the reality is that it will be forgotten about by the time we’re a month into TWW.
Hell, depending on how many people get the epic edition, they’ll likely have to contend with the usual launch shenanigans of disconnects, servers being down, etc.
If anything, the early access will stabilize the launch a bit as it’ll stagger things somewhat. Rather than the server hamster having a heart attack at the word go due to EVERYONE trying to jump in the minute the switch is flipped, you’ll have a much smaller group going in first and allowing Blizzard to react to launch issues if they do indeed pop up. Then the second group comes in three days later, but it’ll be with far less trying to jump in at once on the actual launch day than we usually see.
If you need an analogy, the server is a baseball sized pipe. The playerbase as a whole is essentially a watermelon trying to fit down that pipe. When you try to force that melon into the tiny pipe, the servers proceed to have an aneurism and die.
By splitting the players into two groups, Blizzard is likely hoping that they get two baseballs rather than one huge watermelon.
