I certainly don’t see anything wrong with making fresh servers if there is interest.
Hopefully we can take some lessons learned from Classic, Classic Era, and SoM to try and keep these servers healthier for longer.
Allowing transfers of old characters (especially fairly early) seems to me that it runs against why people would want to start over on a fresh server in the first place.
Part of it is just the levelling experience, which would be mostly over after 90 days.
A lot of it however is having everyone start from the same point, as well as having a less inflated economy.
I don’t think allowing any transfers to these servers from old servers works well with that in mind. Especially not within such a short time. I think the minimum time on restrictions should be significantly longer, if not permanent.
Note: Transfers between different fresh servers should be fine, as well as transferring from fresh to old servers.
I think it is already unclear how many people are going to join these servers, and if the sentiment is that the servers will be the same as any other after 90 days the incentive to start over is severely limited.
This could significantly reduce how many people are willing to commit to the server in the first place.
I also don’t think that restrictions to what items or gold amounts can be transferred will do enough to mitigate the economy issue, and it will not prevent old characters or the use of boosts.
If faction balance is desirable, I believe it will require more direct action from Blizzard than hope. I personally would much prefer to play on a balanced server, but servers generally don’t become balanced on their own. And they especially don’t stay that way.
This is of course not an easy problem to solve by any means, but I do think that new servers bring some more options to enforce faction balance compared to established ones. For example, restricting creation on one faction if balance starts shifting.
Theoretically balance could start being enforced before the servers even go live, by signing up for a server & faction in some way similar to the name reservation system.
If you want to be really strict with faction balance you could lock factions passing something like 55%, and make new players queue to create characters on the majority faction until the factions balance out more.
Regarding server count and population
I would suggest leaning significantly toward fewer servers over more. Players seem to prefer bigger servers in general, and from previous launches smaller servers seem to start dying off rather quickly.
If there ends up being multiple fresh servers of the same type I would ask to please deal with servers with low/dropping populations earlier. Don’t wait until servers die with opening transfers away, or merges/connections/whatever.
I also like the idea of cross-region or international servers. Especially instead of dying or low population servers.