Its gonna be 1-60 only for the first month buddy there wont be any R1s.
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Your first point is true i played Lordeaeron ( old one ) at launch and it was HELL totally but give it 1 WEEK and it will drop a SHARP drop.
and all starting zones will be crowded trust me and my recommendations ? GRIND YOUR WAY OUT OF THE STARTING ZONES totally dont bother with the quests.... for real you might spend 1 hour killing those pigs ( if you are a troll/orc)
4000-5000 online launch day. Mark my words.
Quite frankly I hope the server is capped for months on end. The servers are so boring with only 1.5k - 3k players online. Can't find enough for queues ... no world pvp .. ect.
I bet that it will be full at launch, but after 2 weeks the population will start to decline.
Most people who are spoiled by high rate servers will soon realize that leveling on x1 is too much for them ;) Not to mention that they have no idea how the gearing process works in WotLK - no point shop and FoS/PoS = confusion, panic.
In TBC they nerfed 1-60 leveling by around 20%, and in WOTLK they nerfed 60-70 leveling by around the same again. You also have all the new talents and everything, so leveling is so much easier than it was in Vanilla or TBC. Leveled 1-60 on a 1x Vanilla server some time back too.
While I agree that after the initial boom there will be players leaving, I think it might not be as many as people are assuming, at least for the reason of "not being able to handle retail rates." The server has been declared as such all along, and with even more restrictions than the old Lordaeron, which had a large player base until the mistake of opening transfers to it. I see the people coming play here mostly being the ones who know what they'll get and who want exactly that.
Well if you are going to grind the pigs ( if you are orc/troll) ofc you will grind them with 100+ people... dont do that go to the scorpions around Senjin village grind those :) i have played in pretty much 3 realm starts ( including the old Lordaeron) on molten and i always got a headstart when i did that .( Spawn > run to scorpions> no one there> kill them asap and go to razor hill)
It wouldn't surprise me if Lordaeron pulls off an impressive retention rate of players. Lordaeron has a number of things to offer over the other two WotLK servers:
1) Much better scripting in general, with several class bugs that severely detract from gameplay on Rag/DW being completely absent on Lordaeron.
2) Fresh, retail-like experience of raiding, with close to perfect scripting of encounters (which it presumably will have if Devs continue to maintain their standard so far), where players work their way up from the lower tier WotLK raids, to later Ulduar and ToGC, and then finally ICC/RS, as opposed to on Rag/DW, where the focus is relentless ICC/RS to the point of players burning out, moving on, and the population dwindling.
3) Hardcore 1x rate with several vote-shop/donation limitations. While this is one of the major attractions, this is also where the risk really lies, honestly. There's a number of players who are going to be put off by the fact that scripts like the ones on Lordaeron are gated behind lots of restrictions. If ever those restrictions are also somewhat alleviated (say eventually on the marketplace, Warmane makes it possible to donate for instant lvl 60, or for a buff that increases your exp gained by 20% for 2 days, for instance - for the sake of making alt-leveling and gearing more convenient, so as to boost the number of overall raids that happen at end-game.) There's also going to be a faction of players throwing hissyfits over that.