[AenorVZ]

Originally Posted by Rogean

I don't want to open a second permanent server and have to support both ... There's a lot of concerns that staff had, such as a sudden influx of raid gear from red that was easier to obtain because of lack of any pvp competition.. influx of legacy items, etc

The solution, and I think you could get the staff on board with this, is that all players transferring from Red would have a different name color to flag them as Red refugees. All high end items for the transferred characters should be flagged in such a way that they can only be transferred among former Red players. So it's kind of a scarlet letter. Sure a former Red character may have some uber gear, but it's always obvious which server the gear originated from and they can't flood it into the economy of Blue. You of course could also make it so that former Red players can still engage in PvP with each other on Blue but it sounds like you've already considered that.

Originally Posted by Rogean

The nice pro of a seasonal server though is that we could constantly change up the ruleset every iteration.. discord, teams, ffa, etc

Another pro is that one of those seasons could be the final season. You don't have to commit to another perpetual server.

Originally Posted by Rogean

[It] needs to be teams.. it's the only way to protect the newer/isolated players ... otherwise you get one guild strong arming everyone. Three teams might segregate and already extremely small community a little too much.

It's always going to be one strong guild. Here's why I hope you will reconsider the original Race War ruleset. When Tallon Zek opened, it was the only ruleset that was so popular that they had to immediately make a copy of it (Vallon Zek) to load balance the population. Rallos and Sullon Zek never had this problem.

Here's how it went on those two servers. On Tallon Zek, the evil team won for the exact reason you mentioned. The zergs planned ahead to share Evil team (just like they did on Sullon Zek) and no other team had a chance. On Vallon Zek, Sirken and many others fought at my side to make sure Evil did not prevail. The three light race teams banded together.

Now I know we'll get a major cryfest about cross teaming but soft coded teams provides players with political options. You can be team exclusive. You can crossteam. Only WoW players need the ruleset to establish who their allies and enemies were. There is no interaction so real as when you're grouping with and trusting someone knowing they could attack you if they chose to. Interactions in a hardcoded environment will never be that meaningful.