I just wanted to start the conversation and throw the idea out there early right now. I would love it if we got WOTLK Era after they move on from WOTLK classic. I think Blizzard should make just 1 server per region for us to transfer our WOTLK classic characters to to continue our journey in Northrend. I have a couple of points that I would like to go over to try to make my point.
First, I know that there are a lot of nay-sayers about Classic Era that call it “dead”, but if you actually log onto Whitemane or Mankrik on classic era you will see a vibrant community on both realms with multiple guilds raiding and pugs running on either realm. You will also see BGs popping at least Friday-Sunday every week, even Alterac Valley pops regularly! This works great with a couple of servers that feel active and alive, so I would suggest making just 1 server per region so that even if the active population isn’t huge, it will still feel alive and encourage people to come back and play, like people have been in Classic Era. If Classic Era can be this active, then so can the most popular WoW expansion of all time, WOTLK… Which brings me to my next point.
Second, I have never played private servers, but from what I hear there is one private server in particular for WOTLK that has been around and thriving longer than any other private server in existence, and this is a WOTLK server. There is clearly a market for people that want to play WOTLK and are fine with staying there long-term without new content even coming out. This is a good way for blizzard to get the market and keep it, instead of losing it when we move on to new content, whether that be Cataclysm or Classic+. This is a way for Blizzard to not only make those players happy. But also the players like myself who never played private servers, but have been waiting for a legitimate way to play WOTLK long term for years and have not had the opportunity.
Third, this is also a way to keep people subscribed for long periods of time. In the time that I have spent on the Classic Era realms I have met many people who raid and PvP on classic era, but also do content on the main-line Classic realms, and even on retail. Having a WOTLK Era server would be a way for Blizzard to keep players subscribed and playing an expansion that they love when there are droughts in retail or in the main-line classic servers.
Finally, with an apparent desire for seasonal servers of all types in the community, this is a great way to create a place for people to put their characters that they had in a potential WOTLK Season of Mastery server when the server moves on to the next seasonal server, so that they don’t lose their progress and can come back and reminisce and maybe do some content with the stable guilds that will be on the server. As of right now we have that option when moving from Season of Mastery, but what will happen when we go to move past a classic seasonal server? We need an option for those that don’t want to lose their character, but also don’t want to have it forced to move onto Cata, or MoP, or whatever seasonal server might be next in line in the future. This is a great long term plan for people to save their progress and come back to it whenever they want.
Please let me know what you guys think. I know that this is early, but I wanted to throw it out there so that it’s in Blizzard’s head early and they don’t forget about the option. They said when they didn’t make a TBC Era server that they would be open to making servers like Era in the future if we were interested, and I am interested! Thanks.