I'd say rather have 2 raid lockouts per week so people can get gear faster and have shorter times between expansions than to have 1 raid lockout per week and longer between expansions.
Because people lose interest pretty quickly and the server will be empty if it takes too long.
3 months lvling and dungeons farming content (x5 with RDF should be really fun for whose want to lvl in dungeons, i already have 3 loremasters so :s)
3 months MC content
3 months BWL/Onyxia content
3 months AQ/ZulGurub
Something like that.
But what about Naxxramas damn it? :(
Maybe they will magically teleport it back to Plagues.
I think the more people get the opportunity to finish the content the more popular the realm will be.. So aim should be to give the maximum amount of time possible to people to finish each tier. If it is buffed tuned up content then people will need even more time to finish the content! I remember a guild took a year to do LOD in Lordaeron.
For this reason and also for new and returning players who missed out on the previous tier's content and would like to do them and for those who have gotten bored of doing the current tier's raid over and over again keeping the previous tier's raids relevant(challenging and giving best quality loot) would go a long way, can call them Mythic tier raids.
Also removing the lockout period will boost raiding . As a player doing a raid multiple times instead of one time boosts the raiding population available each week for each raid on average. This will make the server more active.
Removing the lockout period will also boost mythic dungeons population the same way. Also you can have many mythic dungeons available each week rather than one. More fun if you ask me!
You can make all these mythic raiding and dungeon options doable as many times as one likes each week dropping the very best loot and still keep players pace of gearing at a check. You just have to tweak the loot distribution system a bit. For example getting bosses to drop tokens instead of gears that can be exchanged for boss loot chests from say an npc. The first loot chest each week can be obtained for say one token but the subsequent loot chest can cost an increasing amount of tokens. If you set the extra amount of tokens required number high enough players wont be able to gear up much faster than if they did just one raid each week. This way you can check the pace at which players gear up while still giving them the option to do all the raids in an equally intense challenging difficulty with the same very best loot as many times as they like!
Much better than one raid one time each week if you ask me! Also people won't be missing out on the earlier tier raids and dungeons as much if they continue to be available as an equally intense challenge with same BiS loot!
I'd say rather have 2 raid lockouts per week so people can get gear faster and have shorter times between expansions than to have 1 raid lockout per week and longer between expansions.
Because people lose interest pretty quickly and the server will be empty if it takes too long.
The last time they tried this, the following season was a ghost town because everyone was super burned out. Imagine doing MC and BWL and AQ 2x per week, it's a recipe for disaster. This server should be a slow burn, otherwise it's no different from classic.
Will there be alliance only paladins and horde only shamans in "vanilla phase"? Since it's gonna be 3.3.5 anyway, maybe going for blood elves and draeneis from very beginning isn't a bad idea.
One month and half for Vanilla and Burning Crusade?
Why would we even go through the trouble if whole expansions were meant to be up for not even two months...
I seriously do hope you guys make a multiyear experience out of this!