The only thing I like about the WoW tokens is that I have not gotten one single gold advertisement in the mail or in chat ever since they were added in. People were already buying gold before the tokens came around. Blizz knew it. it is when you see an AH auction for a white piece of gear for tens of thousands of gold or stuff like that.
This is a lost cause, but I will offer some ways cataclysm could be done to “not” make it a complete trainwreck.
New realms only, no clones or transfers, must go through the new world.
No stupidly fast leveling rate. Use the classic 1-60 speed. No boosts or buffs either. Heirlooms could be left in but no one would have any at launch.
Unnerf the difficulty of questing and dungeons. Cataclysm made everything a complete joke until you get to heroics. This is unnecessary for a whole new world full of players.
Get rid of outland/northrend. Put the new content at 60, with the new cap being 65. This is a new game. It should not try to be an expansion as well. This would also make the talent page reductions less stupid. 41p could have been ok with 60-65 levels. It is not ok with 85 levels.
Remove flying mounts. The game would take place entirely on Earth with no outland/northrend. This means there’s no need fly flying anymore other than a few things after 60 which could be edited for ground access. Blizzard even admitted that putting in flying was one of their biggest mistakes but cataclysm was a missed golden opportunity to take them back out.
The main fault of cataclysm is trying to be a new game AND expansion at same time. They needed to pick a side and stick with it. I just told you how to do that. If I were the developer instead of a regularly ignored/censored user, this is the cataclysm you could have had back then, or hosted now.
it was a close to viable and in later expansions they made it a full on DPS to HPS spec. They’ve already shown us that major changes can occur in only 1 glyph (hello feral), so yes it is a totally reasonable request to get holy form smite priest in Cata+
Shareholders will be fired up about cataclysm just like they were with wrath. They know how successful it was in the end and are definitely willing to pull resources from other projects to maintain it.
Outland and Northrend was always a funny hic-up while leveling after Cata was released. Though you did level up thru them fairly quickly for the most part.
I guess people want the Cataclysm without the Catalysm.