As many of you probably know, the population (especially alliance side) has been steadily declining lately. While there are many factors that go into this, such as new servers being opened and people flock to those for new content; a large issue has been guilds breaking up/taking breaks from lack of attendance and viable raiders available to them as a community. This is a HUGE issue on alliance side, and I'm sure it's becoming a larger issue on horde side. Like I said, there are many problems that relate to this issue, but I will stick to the ones specific to this server.
As a note before I go into the main reasons why we are losing people and what should be changed; I want to say that I enjoy the higher difficulty presented by the tuning on Outland and don't want that to change or not be applied to future content.
***1.) Tier 4 Content
While this is probably the least of the issues, there are apparently some bugs with Gruul at the moment that make the fight much harder than it should be, causing a "bottleneck" for guilds in their attunements. Again, this isn't that bad as you can play around it and farm other content to brute force through it, but should be fixed none the less.
***2.) T5 attunements
Why are these still in the game? These were removed in patch 2.1.2 by blizzard because of EXACTLY what they are doing on this server, preventing guilds from recruiting easier.
http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Serpen...ern#Attunement
Hotfix (2007-06-19): "After a lot of thought and deliberation, we’ve decided to remove the attunement requirements to enter Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep: The Eye. While many of our attunements in the Burning Crusade have been good progression checks, a few of the attunements have turned out to cause unnecessary stress on guilds either doing the content or attempting to do the content. With Black Temple and Battle for Mount Hyjal thriving, we want to encourage (rather than prevent) new guilds and raid groups to attempt Serpentshrine and TK. We are going to leave the current attunement quests in the game so that players can still engage in the challenge and the lore of those quests should they choose to. At a later point, we are considering adding a final reward step to those quests as well (that way those who have already completed them would not miss out on a *new* reward)."
Blizzard themselves knew that attunements were putting too much stress on guilds having to farm far too many raids in a single lockout to keep their raiders up and keep new players flowing into the later tiers of content, so they removed them in a hotfix.
http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Patch_2.1.2
This was released patch 2.1.2 (check the date, it is not posted here because it was a hotfix maintenance right after the actual patch). If we are about to have ZA released (which is patch 2.3) why can't we have this in place to help remove some of the bottleneck for getting players into T5.
I feel like the warmane staff is trying to put too much value on attunements, when they SHOULD just be letting the increased difficulty from the tuning be the real "gate-keeper". No guild progressing in T4 is going to go full clear T5 if you remove their attunements, it will only help them gear progress and help tier 6 guilds gear/attune new characters faster.
***3.) Increased tuning and difficulty
As I said, I enjoy the increased difficulty and don't want it to be nerfed or changed, especially for sunwell. That being said, it does have a "negative" affect on the T6 raiding guilds. With the content being tuned at a higher difficulty, the amount of effort required to get a new recruit both vials becomes extremely high. Clearing T5, even in T6 guilds, requires a large amount of your main raiders and one or even two raid days to clear, just to get a few people attuned.
http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Patch_2.4.0
"You may now fight Combat 15 Prince Kael'thas and Combat 15 Lady Vashj without first killing all the other bosses in their respective dungeons."
In patch 2.4 they allowed guilds to skip directly to KT and Vashj without needing to clear all of the other bosses in the raid. While this is not a "blizzlike" feature for our current patch, I feel like having this in place would alleviate MUCH of the pressure on the T6 guilds to get new recruits. These bosses are still VERY difficult, especially for guilds that are not as geared, so the T5 progress guilds will still need to farm T5 and gear up before attempting these last bosses. Warmane, let your increased tuning be the "gates" for fighting these bosses, no guild that is 4/6 or 2/4 in T5 will just go kill these bosses with ease.
***4.) Cash Shop
While I do understand that the server will eventually have all items on the shop for purchase, I feel like this is an issue that should be discussed. As I said, I understand your plans are to have ALL items on the shop eventually, the main concern I have is the speed at which they are released and the 0 requirements for them. Mount Hyjal gear was released within what, 6 weeks of BT release? That is far too soon and adds a large amount of demotivation to people raiding. Why raid when you can just farm gold and buy the gear in a couple months.
Hyjal gear could have been released on the shop with ZA release, and BT gear released when we are closing in on SWP patch; and while it is not possible to do it for gear that is already out on the shop, how about adding a requirement to the gear that you must be attuned to the raid to equip it? At the very least the release timing of the gear should be slowed down, and I really think black temple gear should require black temple attunment (same with sunwell if you plan on doing the custom attunement mentioned before).
At the very least we should have issues #1 & #2 addressed. #3 would help out SOOOO much for guilds in T6 content and I don't feel it will have an impact at all on the T5 progressing guilds. #4 would be nice as well to slow down the pace of gear added a bit and adding attunement required would be perfect (would even go well with you making GETTING attuned easier).
Overall, this server has been very good quality and content wise and it's disappointing to see the population disappear so quickly because of things that are easily addressed.