There’s been a lot of discussion on reddit lately about what the rules for hardcore servers should look like. Now, in Aggrend’s announcement, it basically sounded like the team is planning on simply making it so that once you die, you can’t resurrect anymore and that’s it. So what do you think, should that be the end of it, or should there be additional restrictions for players?
In the rest of this thread I’ll give my personal opinion. I’ll preface the rest by saying I’ve made it up to level 48 in the hardcore challenge so far, with a few deaths along the way. 
Certainly not as much experience as some, but I have at least put in a decent chunk of time!
Trading with other players/AH below level 60
A lot of the community seems to think that trading/AH should be allowed starting from level 1, and the common argument here is that “if people want to do a Solo Self Found (SSF) challenge they can still just do it, since players who trade and use the AH will not impact them.”
I think probably the most important factor to consider here is preserving the difficulty/prestige of completing the hardcore challenge, and especially a SSF HC challenge, which I think everyone would agree is harder. In a world where AH/trading is allowed, the first wave of levelers will have completed the challenge at its hardest point. However, a few months later when raiders and max level characters have farmed all of the best enchant formulas, these enchants will make their way into the hands of low level characters, and at that point, the achievement of anyone who leveled in the first wave is greatly diminished, because now leveling is significantly easier for everyone. Now, maybe Blizzard will implement some sort of achievement system, which I think would be awesome, and would mitigate this negative aspect of AH/trading being allowed. If there’s not a VERY obvious in-game distinction between a level 60 character who’s done a full SSF run and a level 60 who went full Azamous mode, then my motivation to do a full SSF run is greatly lowered, even though a SSF run sounds much more fun to me.
There have been suggestions of trading being allowed within a level range (within 5 levels is a number I’ve seen thrown around a lot). I think anyone thinking this is a good idea hugely underestimates the levels Classic players will go to to make their characters more powerful or simply make gold. I would bet money that we would see players develop a specialty service to deliver powerful enchanted items from high level characters to low level characters. They’ll have a level 55 character who takes from the level 60s, then a 50 who takes from the 55, and so on until the item is delivered to the target low level character. Now, if trading is to be allowed, a much better solution in my opinion would be to allow trading only with players of the same level as you. This ensures that items only ever go upward, while still allowing trading with a designated leveling partner.
Grouping with other players
I think allowing grouping is fine, as in my experience, no grouping means massive bottlenecks at the lower levels. On my way to 48, I skipped many quests at the lower levels because there were just too many people waiting for a named quest mob to respawn.
At the end of the day, lots of people want to play WoW with their friends, and I think they should be able to do that. Grouping with others also often results in positive bonds being developed even among strangers, which is part of what WoW Classic is all about! And especially with the higher stakes of the HC playstyle, there’s even more reasons for strangers to strategize with each other and actually think about the content they’re doing.
Reincarnate/Soulstone/Bubble + Hearth/Light of Elune + Hearth/Petri Flask + leave instance group/Unstuck
These above items are all not allowed in the traditional HC community ruleset, aside from petri + leave group. These are effectively “get out of jail free” cards. My issue with some of these items is that they seem a bit arbitrary. Rogues have vanish, and hunters have feign death for when things are going south. Keep in mind that FD does not have a chance to be resisted if casted far enough away (~40 yds) from a given enemy. Shouldn’t these also not be allowed then? What’s the reasoning for these restrictions? Hearthstone has an hour long cooldown, so if you want to have bubble + hearth available as a cooldown, you’ll have to only play the game when your hearthstone is not on cooldown. That’s a big price to pay for being more safe. At the end of the day, most classes can easily be safe if they just never play the game without their cooldowns up, so I don’t see why paladins in particular get the short end of the stick here. Furthermore, I don’t think bubble + hearth even works until level 50, since that’s when paladins get the 12s bubble.
Shaman reincarnate - I think there is a discussion to be had, although I ultimately lean in favor of not allowing it, at least in the traditional state. I think any time you die as a shaman with ankh allowed, you’re just gonna not click the button until you’ve asked your friends to come and clear the area of mobs. That sort of behavior just doesn’t really seem like it’s in the spirit of hardcore. On the other hand, it does feel bad to just take away a powerful and unique part of a shaman’s kit without really compensating them. Maybe there could be some sort of compromise, like making it so that it automatically resurrects you after 5 seconds of being dead?
Soulstone - I don’t think it should be allowed due to the fact that it can be casted on others. This would no doubt result in very degenerate gameplay pretty much everywhere but especially so in end-game content. Now, maybe it could be changed to only be castable on yourself, and just automatically resurrect you when you die as described above.
Flask of Petrification + leave group - This is basically a “get out of jail free” card for dungeons and some raid bosses and works for every class, though apparently petri flask doesn’t work for some raid boss mechanics. Even still, it’s very powerful and pretty much ensures that you always escape a dungeon if it’s not looking good. Now, it does take a lot of effort to farm petri flasks, and maybe it’s fine to have a bit more protection for players who made it to level 60 already. I don’t really have a strong opinion on this one, and I’d like to hear from some more experienced players who have had experience with petri flasking on current HC servers.
Unstuck feature - I think it shouldn’t be allowed, or if it is allowed then the team needs to change how it works. This offers an out to avoid fall damage deaths, which is a legitimate way of dying that should not be able to be cheesed. Just alt-f4 when you accidentally jump off the Great Lift and unstuck yourself to Org/SW. If you are truly stuck, then you can still beg a warlock to summon you or wait for your hearthstone CD.
World buffs
It’s absolutely wild to me that world buffs are allowed for low level characters in the HC ruleset but trading/AH is not allowed. World buffs have an obscenely powerful effect on low level characters, certainly more than any combination of tradeable gear would. As discussed above, I think preserving the difficulty/prestige of the challenge is very important, and therefore I think we should maintain a situation where nobody is questioning whether someone else completed the HC challenge by relying heavily on world buffs.
PvP
I think it’s pretty obvious that the honor/ranking system wouldn’t really work in hardcore.
Maybe PvP flagging should be disabled altogether to prevent griefing, but I’m not really sure. PvP deaths could be some of the most memorable moments in a hardcore PvE server. Additionally, you can most definitely avoid getting PvP flag griefed in a lot of situations by turning on “Interact on Left Click” in interface options. Maybe Blizzard could add a little tip to make this feature more well known for less experienced players entering HC realms, and keep flagging as it is.
Mob kiting/leashing
I hope the team is paying attention to how players are griefing each other in community HC servers currently by kiting mobs, and I hope they’ll make adjustments to the game to prevent some of these more common griefing methods.
Keep in mind that griefing on official servers will be massively different from griefing on current HC servers, since griefers will be risking their own lives as well!
Limiting characters to one run of each dungeon
One of the community rules is that you can only do each dungeon one time per character until max level. I’m honestly not really sure how to feel on this one. I think the difficulty/prestige factor is worth considering here, since if your squad of friends has a good routine for hours of dungeon spam, it could probably be pretty risk-free and also very good exp/hr. Now of course, players could just grind mobs all the way to level 60 without doing any quests or dungeons, however that is considered mind-numbingly boring by most players, which sort of keeps that method in check. With dungeons though, I think a lot of people wouldn’t mind blasting through them over and over with their friends. Overall I’m not really sure where I stand on this one, but I think I lean in favor of the community ruleset’s limit of one of each dungeon per character until max level.
That’s all I have for now. Curious what others have to say about HC server rules. I think it’s an interesting topic!