Yeah for sure. I suppose the real questions that remain though are around how much of a problem population balance actually is. It may feel like it’s an issue, but it may not really matter (maybe it does, and maybe there are other factors to consider when looking at population data, like natural drop off from WoW Classic and people who came back just for TBC Classic, etc.).
Additionally, if changes cost resources to design, develop, implement and maintain, do not add a predictable increase in revenue, do decrease revenue (transfer fees), and may lead to a decrease in the playerbase (maybe not/maybe an increase — it isn’t clear to me that making changes will increase subscriptions), who would sign off on that?
This may be true, but if it’s basically giving low pop servers access to high pop tanks, then wouldn’t this negatively impact the higher population servers?
The more you think through them, the more complicated they seem to be, and there’s almost always guaranteed to be unanticipated side-effects to even small changes.
A couple of ideas that I’ve had around server populations have been to remove character-server locks, so you could log into any server with any of your characters (provided they are within the region that government tax regulations require Blizzard to be reporting taxable revenue for your subscription). You could then have servers spin up/down depending on population, and if you’d like to add faction balance or other things, you could do so on a server by server basis.
Some things like guilds, and looking for group could coordinate over BattleNet maybe more like a lobby. Perhaps there could be AH access in that lobby as well.
Another idea was to add a Battleground type of wPVP with badges and honor rewards. You queue for it, and get grouped into raids of 40, and are zoned as a raid onto a PVP server with disparate faction balance, such as Alliance raids zoning into Faerlina with objectives like wiping a major city and boss (or zone) within a timeframe.
This could add some wPVP risk/fun to faction disparate servers, while giving an additional way to farm honor, and potentially have some fun.
Anyway, I don’t really expect these things to change in the Classic series, but you never know! Hopefully people are able to enjoy playing the game the way they want.