Actionable idea to increase Population for phase 4

It would be one of the lowest effort things they could do to get people back in the game and playing.

Crafters would have reason to make what are essentially cosmetic only items, some people would farm dungeons and/or obscure world drops/quests, and it would make the RP community much happier since they’ve been dumped on more than just about anyone else in SoD.

No itemization changes required, don’t need to add anything new to the game, and the code is already there - just needs to be adapted to SoD (if an adaptation is even needed).

Transmog would be one of the lowest hanging fruit they could grab to breathe a little life back into this.

Coming from a game design student’s perspective, implementing transmog would actually take a LOT of effort and time to implement. The primary reason is that transmog is part of the cata/retail codebase, which is very different from the vanilla codebase. Additionally, this would require either a special npc to do the transmogs for you (would probably need to be done as some sort of enchantment on the item) or the addition of the collections tab, both of which would be very labor-expensive to implement.

Not saying it wouldnt be cool, but it would not be as easy as copy-pasting the transmog code from cata.

  1. buff level 51-60 dungeon gear so people can grind for pre bis/alts (avoid the gnomer vs ST gear issue)

  2. gdkp

  3. delete hint/fera incursion xp

Still, the lowest hanging fruit. I mean, they could have put in transmog instead of designing incursions from (presumably) scratch. But they do what they do.

Are you slow? You said “Classic players were having meltdowns over changes to Era”. I said “it’s almost like there weren’t supposed to be changes”.

I thought phase 1 sod was good. The changes were mostly tasteful. The changes since simply make sod antithetical to classic. The changes since are why the game has barely anyone left playing it. Good job Wrath babies.

You’re definitely slow for suggesting transmog.

points to retail

All that said, if they simply released progressive Vanilla servers on an 18 month cycle, you’d literally never hear from me or people like me again. You could advocate for the destruction of your game all you wanted and I wouldn’t care at all. Alas, they’ve tried to toe the line and appeal to both and that will never work. You guys will beg for RDF and transmog and all the other modern garbage that makes retail suck, and you’ll get half of it. You’ll also get a sub 100k pop to play with, so enjoy!

I’m not talking about the changes like rebalancing classes or new abilities. These were changes that had to be in place for the game to even work with the newer server infrastructure. And people couldn’t handle that.

Which is besides the point. This is SoD. We are free of the constrains of Era.

They should. No really, it’s why restaurants have a menu. Because not everyone likes the same thing.

And it does appear like they might change Era to be Era Progression that will go through the original expansion trilogy. – Survey questionnaire had an interesting question with an equally interesting answer option.

They should also run “Era Servers” for each expansion. Assuming that current Era is an indication of how stable the populations would be, that would be 10 servers; 1 server per expansion (including Vanilla and Dragonflight as expansions). – I would say they would likely need to use something like Warmode because there just wouldn’t be enough population to split it between two (or more; sorry RPers) server types.

Leveling isn’t the issue.

Read a few topics here.
People blast through content (okay incursions) hit max capped level with very good gear. Leave to chase the next shiny object in a different version of Wow. Return when “new” content is released. Rinse and repeat.

Cloning Era characters to seasonal does not seem to me to be what most active Era players want.
(Full disclosure - I play Era but not on a steady, everyday basis because I spread my time in Wow over HC and SoD as well.) Specifically as you have presented it, it’s basically a level 60 boost in seasonal. SoD is a limited time offering and it’s super easy to level. No boost needed nor do I believe it would increase active numbers significantly.