All for F R E S H. Smart on Blizzard to try to capture new and returning players with the popularity of Wrath. I think people doubting Wrath Classic don’t know how large its diehard fanbase is. If you’re thinking, “this is dumb why would anyone play this?” I can guarantee you’re not the target audience.
My first thought here is: What does a Fresh server look like after 90 days?
On the progressive servers, Ulduar / Phase 2 could realistically be getting released on or around 90 days. This would be a much faster P1 than 2008 Wrath, but:
- TBCC was also expediated (each phase was about 1 month faster than historical, give or take),
- People hate Naxx25 (the developer rationale for a long P1 in 2008 was too few got the chance to do Naxx40 in 2006; that’s not the case in WLKC), and
- Everyone loves Ulduar (even Brian said he’s looking forward to it)
On fresh servers, you probably want another month (give or take) to let people level. Which is a whole other conversation around whether Fresh and Progressive should have separate timelines… but I digress.
Let’s say transfers allowed at Phase 2 / Ulduar. Is this enough time to not care about players from Progressive (old) coming into Fresh (new)? The issues here are (a) economy and (b) player progression.
(a) Economy is ironically not as big of an issue as players are making out if the bots have already ruined (“inflated”) the fresh servers after 90 days. Which they probably will. That is a whole other issue that needs to be prioritized.
If the economy is a concern, though, change the transfer rules for Classic. They’re right here btw https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/000034787 click on Burning Crusade Classic tab.
You fix the economy concern by limiting what people can transfer. Lower the gold maximums and zero (or severely limit) tradeable items. TBH I’m not sure this is actually a significant concern though - Blizzard would have a better idea how much RMT gold is being moved cross server. My guess is less than you think. I could be naive about this. But my guess is after 90 days it’s already a mess. So have at it.
(b) Player progression is harder. Notsomuch ‘player power’, per se, but for example do you want to allow people to have Tier 3 on a server that has no way to acquire Tier 3? Corrupted Ashbringer? Atiesh? Amani War Bear? Scarab Lord? Do you want things like Ashes of Al’ar, Warglaives, Thunderfury, etc. 90 days into a server where these take significantly longer than that on average to farm?
On a server where the point is everyone starts on the same footing, ‘same footing’ is being pigeonholed pretty hard to mean ‘power level’ once you open up transfers.
So I’m going to agree with my peers here. No to transfers from Progressive to Fresh 