Fylgja

Killerduki doesn't really know what he's talking about, that's not what killed Feenix, it was negligence and corruption. Of course the system has its ugly spots, just like everything. Gotta realize that Feenix already had absurd gold inflation fueled by gold selling (both by chinamen and the server itself) and corrupted staff pooling gold into economy. There was also the little fact that a big portion of the server was extremely overgeared, even alts on Alliance ran around in T3 and other Naxxramas gear. Those factors combined allowed cakewalk BWL/AQ40 pugs (hell, we even had Naxxramas pugs!) and people spending 50k on a single piece. Feenix was a very old and stagnated server that suffered from a lot of corruption during its lifetime, the GDKP fewer hit it on its last days.

Pretty stupid idea, all it does is make the game less fun. If you want harder content, you buff that content instead of hamstringing the game. What would be the point of world buffs at all if you can't make use of them while raiding? None at all.

Stuff like this would just improve the game with no negative effects.

Gear based matchmaking would be pointless anyway as we don't have the abysmal gear gaps and stuff like resilience in vanilla..

Yeah, honestly, all servers had this cancer going on.

In which magical universe honor farming premades don't just dodge other premades?

They aren't there for PvP, they're there to farm honor as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Tangible rewards from PvP have never done anything but harm.

I'm not someone who cares about about words on the internet and I find people who get triggered by everything and start screaming meaningless buzzwords like "racism" and "sexism" pretty pitiful. I do get annoyed by obnoxious people who just don't know when to stop and not because of what they say but the frequency of it, the kind of people that spends most of their time pissing off others and making asshats out of themselves. It would be nice if those were kept in check.

In an ideal word, premades would only face other premades, and semi premades, other semi premades if those are available and pugs if there's nothing else. Sadly nothing was ever done about this issue on any server I've played.

Those two things aren't really comparable in practice, totems are bound to a myriad of limitations, are plain unusable in some fights while having very limited use in others.

Cross-realm BGs were the main reason they became so bad and unfun, absolutely not.

To me, the spirit of vanilla wasn't stagnation but constant changes with every patch. I agree that buffs to content's difficulty are needed, else things will get old really, really fast.

This post isn't as much as a suggestion but more of food for thought. I have played extensively on multiple vanilla private servers that I shall not mention, servers that lasted for a long time. I have seen them evolve and stagnate over the years as content was trivialized and put to farm. Certain issues became more and more apparent as the server dragged on, issues that weren't as clear on retail because the vanilla period didn't last that long and changes were constant. In case of private servers, we're basically suspended in time for years, with no balance changes ever happening. The biggest two issues those old servers faced are: 1. Faction imbalance. With this I don't mean numbers but the power gap between them, which as you probably assumed already, nails down to Paladins vs Shamans. Even if the numbers remain similar, the advantage inevitably shifts towards Alliance, especially as harder content (AQ40/Naxx) gets implemented. Blessings are just that good when it comes to PvM, Blessing of Salvation alone is a massive advantage in threat-sensitive dps races like many Naxxramas fights, and Blessing of Protection easily means the difference between wiping or not if there's a trigger happy caster or the Ignite roll goes wrong. This results in Alliance simply gearing up faster and easier than Horde, which only gets worse with time. This directly impacts the PvP balance as well since Alliance is better geared while also having a distinct mechanical advantage. Late blooming powerhouses like Warlocks and Warriors get so much better with the support of BoP and BoF in organized premades it's not even funny and makes fights pretty one-sided. Paladins also have the natural advantage of being considerably more sturdy and not having to put themselves in Intercept range (dropping totems and Purge) if they want to be useful at all. 2. Content's difficulty. With default values, it gets steamrolled and trivialized in no time because we all know the mechanics and how to min-max. This gets worse with time as well, because people amass herbs and other materials for their consumables and have more battle-ready alts to help fill missing spots (this favors Alliance once again). Some servers beefed up their raid content, be it in terms of the HP values of bosses, their damage or some mechanics being more unforgiving, etc, this actually boosted longevity and made the content more relevant on the long run. I know that with the progression timeline, things are more fun, but I'm sure that many people remember how things turned out on Nostalrius. After the first batch of raid content got released, everything was cleared instantly and raiding guilds quickly began to lose members because people simply got bored and the next batch of content was still months away. Of course, I bring this up assuming the server survives for years and we get to see Naxxramas. I don't know what the plans are and the intended lifespan of the server, but I felt like I had to bring those observations up.