Vanilla WSG is an awesome BG that brings out the best of WoW PvP.
With a little love from blizzard, Era-WSG could become more popular and help bring new players to wow:
tbh loser protection as well would be good (maybe like 33 rep, 198 honour). Too small to be abuseable, but adds up for people to keep queueing even if they get stomped.
It is something to explore, but I am not sure it gets at the heart of the issue.
At the moment, even with a decent win rate, ranking with WSG takes a ton of hours and there are lots of times with few games available.
The solution is to make ranking more ‘reasonable’ but still ‘a lot’ of pvp so that more people are incentivized to take the journey (whether as new mains or for their alts).
With 5x increase in WSG honor from objectives, a person could probably play 2-4 hour / day of WSG for 2 months and rank to 14. It isn’t as much as the previous systems, but it is still a ton of pvp.
I think that’s the sweet spot - ranking to 14 should require one to do 15-25 hours of active pvp per week for 2 months.
For AB-style pvp it should be 20-30 hours since it is so prone to people afk
For AV-style pvp it should be 25-35 hours since it is not even pvp.
Those who have done sands know how long it takes.
Loser protection in addition to*, not in replacement of <3
The problem is games never end. Both teams turtle until the flag holder wants to leave. The match needs a timer. Classic wsg just isn’t good honor at all. There’s some matches that go on for 45 minutes and don’t end. You get only diminished honorable kills for your honor.
I’m glad you enjoy it… WSG isn’t for me though. Back in the day it was fun, but now it’s super meta’d and you really have to be playing at the top of your game if even a few people on the other team are running FAPs and/or using the hidden spots.
Like, don’t get me wrong, it’s cool these things exist, but it makes the gap between casuals and good players really, really wide. As a definitively casual gamer these days, I don’t want to invest the time to play at that level, it’s not for me. I’ll just sit out.
I hope you manage to get folks into it though, good luck and enjoy! 
Not sure honor would be good maybe a buff to rep gained.
if playing horde has taught me anything, purge OP in WSG. Double offensive dispel absolutely ate
Yeah purge is so important in WSG and alliance have no purge other than priests.
So often you get into a situation in which either O or D doesn’t have a purge (or there no priest at all) and it makes it much harder for that team to perform.
But that’s part of the game 
Gotta learn to play around it if you pvp as ally, rocket helm is a good counter to fap if they don’t have priest around.
until you get skull’d 
Fel hunter also has offensive and defensive dispel, but most locks dont seem to know they can even self dispel cc like sheep with fel hunter. They can even dispel other friends too.
You can also counter fap with Sheep, seduce, repentance, gouge, sap, blind, fear, scatter and trap.
If players started using more of their kits they would win more
Some kind of mechanisms would be needed to push a base like honor per hour rate, be that bonus tokens per 10 -15 mins period to both teams, and bonus 1 token to winner?
Also could award 500 points for flag returns and stuff like that to make long games worth it for rankers to actually play the game instead of AFK or quit