Never apologize for being verbose.
I can get why being concerned by the time skip, but speaking strictly for Vanndrel here - three years of downtime is honestly going to be fantastic for me as a player. Mostly because Vanndrel’s been dealing with a lot since WarCraft 2: Tides of Darkness.
Since I’m disregarding Shadowlands as part of Vanndrel’s adventure, that gives my Elf some much, much needed time to just decompress. You can’t keep going from atrocity to atrocity, great evil to great evil, world war to world war constantly and remain even mentally unhealthy.
Settling him down in Stormsong, putting down some roots he’s lacked since Theramore got exploded and Silvermoon kicked him out, is going to be welcome for his character.
Bluntly speaking, he was becoming a quivering ball of neurosis that was going to end up having his own Sylvanas turn if he didn’t get the opportunity to just rest.
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I will now be referring to hotboxed farts as malevolent forces. 
I can’t wait to login to the game and find out that 5 years have passed and the orphans in Stormwind haven’t aged at all. Because you know Blizz is that haphazard. lol
Hey, I age my Draenei… they might not show it, but I increase their years.
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I was a bit skeptical of the timeskip at first but the more I think about it the more I’m all for it. I say the sooner the better
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Yeah, this is an angle I understand as well. I think a lot of it has to do with my actual struggle of not being able to see it. It’s a real struggle with my mind processes time both having a hard time with seeing as well as the concept of it passing (and not seeing it). There’s jokes about having to be effected by time passing, but it actually a real concern for me, because I genuinely dislike thinking about a major aging for my characters. It’s a bit stressful and means I have to consider how they might have changed mentally.
And how were their birthdays? How harsh were their winters? Am I going to have to start drawing Gotosh with some gray (which I don’t really want to) , but he’s a few years younger than Thrall, and this will put Gotosh I think close to 40 now. Thats a lot for me to think about! Especially consider how much I draw him and the characters in his life.
I considered me and my best friend doing something close to that one table top concept called the Quiet Year where you go through a civilization through a whole year I think, but more so cataloguing what happened in the 3 years of something. Biggest problem is that there are multiple stories that are on going, and I have to determine how much did and did not get done in the 3 years where my characters would have been working on it and that I would of wanted to be there for the progression…
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These are only super relevant details in regards to how they impact the character’s story. Otherwise that’s super background fluff that doesn’t need to be super expanded upon.
And I’m saying that as someone who also hyper-focuses on the little details of characters’ lives. Again, swinging back to Vanndrel - part of his post-time skip story is going to be mentioning how his farm almost went belly up its first year thanks to a tropical depression hitting Stormsong and flooding his fields (He’s moved to Millstone Hamlet, so the farm is close to the coast). But that’s all the weather related stuff I’ll need to cover post-Time Skip.
Because there’s such a thing as getting “drowned” in our characters. RP is healthy and pretend is fantastic, but there comes a point where we have to make sure we’re not being subsumed by our own creations. Not saying they don’t matter, but don’t get super stressed about the minutia.
Again, Gotosh is going to be 40 post-Skip you say? Speaking as someone who is 40 IRL, I can tell you right now my view of the seasons is relative. I’ve hit that point of worldly experience that they individually don’t matter, and it’s cumulative. And birthdays? It was another day. (Funnily enough I had my existential crisis event at 37, not 40)
As you get older, and I’d assume this functions for our characters as well, time, well…speeds up. I’m still in a daze that we’re approaching the end of 2022. I swear last I checked it was 2015. Give a character a bit of a mundane routine to their life (In Vanndrel’s case it’s going to be working his small tobacco farm), and the days/weeks/months/years will breeze by without anything dramatic to show for it. And that’s entirely okay.
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Just thought of something…
I think Blizz is saying SL was a 2 year period, and then the time skip is another 3 years? So that’s 5 years. For those of us completely ignoring the 
that is SL, that’s 5 years of time to account for. 
My panda when I get her to 60 will have just arrived in Stormwind from her homeland, so nothing really to think about there. My other characters I’ll have to think about.
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I will do as I always have and deny your reality in substitution of my own.
Characters should be changing and growing/evolving over time. Time is a thing that has always been passing from expansion to expansion. This time it’s three years instead of one or two, but that shouldn’t be such a big deal in the grand scheme. Besides, immutable characters grow tiresome and become difficult to believe; and I feel like it’s a large part of the draw to roleplay in the first place to create a character and watch it change with its life’s events.
It’s also okay for periods of years to pass in relative calm. This happens to us in real life, so it shouldn’t be so hard to imagine and translate to the game. One could even argue that our characters deserve a little three year break from the constant onslaught of world-ending threats and planet-shattering war they’ve been enduring for so long now. Life comes in waves of happiness, sadness, and the mundane ocean in between. In the end, it’s gonna be okay. And if anyone playing a race that’s not long-lived is terribly concerned about their character getting old, thank goodness we roleplay in a setting filled with all types of magic that can compensate for aging or even extend life. Lean in and find ways to make it work. They are there if you look.
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For anyone playing a mage class that is human or otherwise mortally afflicted, it’s a common trope in fantasy that mages have a longer lifespan. There’s also alchemy, which can produce numerous alchemical wonders. Engineering is basically the mad scientist trade, I’m quite sure the teleporters could bugger up and de-age a person.
There’s enough magical finger-wiggling going on in haunted places like Karazan (or however it’s spelled) and elsewhere that it’s no a stretch to say your character ran afoul of being “stuck in time”. That could even be an RP hook. Looking for a cure so you don’t live past your loved ones. Or maybe it drove you mad and you want everyone to experience the wonders of the haunted castle and it’s age-stopping magic.
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I’m going to start all walk up rp by asking people what year it is and if they don’t say my headcanon year 42069 I’m going to tell them they’re ugly and wrong, their RP is bad and post on one of those rp drama blogs and cancel them off the server.
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Still plenty on Azeroth to be dealing with during that 5 year span.
We still have plenty of Wounds to heal of the planet.
Demonic leftovers from the Legion invasion.
Members of the Horde/Alliance who have gone insurgent and refuse to recognize the peace.
Sylvanas did break the Crown of Domination. We can ignore Shadowlands’ stuff but that did still happen, which means the Undead went on a little rampage there.
Hell, just in Stormsong alone, Vanndrel’s going to have been spending his time dealing with Naga and the Old God worshiping Tidesages and the cults sprouting up there-in.
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I’ve gone the past 5 years IRL without any meaningful character development I see no reason my characters should do different
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Only server canon I follow is that Gravy is the best darn bartender in town!
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I’ve never, not ever, seen attempts at server-wide headcanon work. At a guild or small community level, yes. But not at server level. At least not in WoW.
We’ve always had " a lot of weird pedantry" from lore-yers. Personally, I’ve had someone try to tell me I had to change a Troll character’s name because it had one too many syllables. And there’s a great (true) story about a lore-yer throwing a hissy-fit because a farmer IC thought the whole thing with Argus was a just a government conspiracy, using some Gnome tech to put a pink light in the sky so they could raise taxes and clamp down on dissidents. Three guesses whom I’d rather play with.
I very much doubt every single culture in Azeroth adheres to the Gregorian calendar. So what does “five years” mean anyway? More importantly, if you think about it more than one npc in Shadowlands said something about losing track of time. Between time in the shadowlands flowing at a different rate, and whatever the Bronze get up to over the course of DF, imho there’s plenty of IC justification to give other players some slack about how they deal with it. Which is what we all should probably be doing anyway with the nit-picky aspects of all the lore.
Which is not to say a time gap isn’t useful. works out great for Kunbo & Ingheti from a player point of view. We get to jump from newborn cub to a walker-talker (lets us use the monk pet) without anyone giving us hard time about growth rates of Pandaren. 
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Unless Azeroth rotates around the sun at a different rate than earth does, then 5 years is 1825 24 hour days.
And I might be wrong in thinking that you’re thinking the whole timeskip thing is a attempted server headcannon?
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Whatever calendars are used, it seems to be fairly close to our current real world one. Warcraft keeps it simple that way so there’s less confusion. Currently our years are counted via how many years it’s been since the Dark Portal.
There’s definitely leeway in how we decide we want to rp it. Personally, I think so long as the time is specified there’s nothing wrong with doing rp that takes place in Wrath or BC or during the time skip between SL and DF. I tend to think of events as bubbles in time. Snapshots in “history” that we don’t necessarily experience in chronological order.
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Honestly I am thrilled about the Timeskip, most notably because of when it has occurred. Shadowlands hit a lot of us, dare I say most of us, hard. This kind of feels like a deep breath - a reset. An opportunity to come back fresh, leave the past at the door, and delve back into a new adventure.
Could be selfish of me, having been on hiatus for months (aside from a brief return to recapture Lordaeron 
) but it’s nice to be able to leave a bad expansion behind, have some quiet time IC, and return with a chance to almost create a second backstory. Where was Sarestha? What’s she been up to? In what ways has she changed? Etc, etc. Feels like a breath of fresh air, and honestly it’s the main reason I’m playing again.
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The undead are allowed a little rampage. As a treat.
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