Yes, this is a new account, I don't want to use my regular account. Bear in mind, I have no coding experience, this thread is to share an idea that may be useful for the Legacy community.

Starting off, I've been thinking very heavily lately trying to procure ideas for how Blizzard could do Legacy while simultaneously pleasing their Legacy players, releasing new content for their current-content players, and making money while doing so. What with the huge explosion of the private server scene lately, and the Battle.net forums having regular discussion over Legacy, it's very obvious that there are many newer players that would try out, and many veteran players that would come back for, older iterations of the game. Yet, on the other foot, there are some people that think creating a focus on maintaining Legacy servers would take a huge focus from the live version of the game, thus impacting the quality and speed of content.

With that being said, how could Blizzard implement older versions of the game while making as many customers as happy as possible? By the use of their wonderful implementation of phasing. As I stated at the beginning of the post, I have no knowledge of coding. However, with Blizzard's already extensive use of phasing in the last few expansions, this idea seems to be possible. Let's jump into it.

While it would likely be a fairly expensive and difficult process of opening up multiple different servers for each iteration of the game and hiring staff to keep up with them, what if Blizzard could simply implement the older versions of the game into the live version. In the past, with every new expansion release, an entirely new mass of content comes with it, such as zones to explore, races to play, new spells, gear stat changes, character stat changes, UI changes...always completely changing how the older version of the game worked, how classes played, and how the game felt. However, as we all know, every time this happens, the players are rendered unable to play the game as they played it before, instead being forced into either playing the changed live version or playing on an illegal server hosted by people that have no affiliation with Blizzard, and even then the content is never accurate as to how it was before.

With this in mind, picture a launcher or a selection screen at the opening of the client, that allows you to choose the expansion you're playing on, as well as your realm, before logging in. Using phasing, Blizzard could keep their same realms online and allow people to play on their server, without clashing between expansions and without the need to create separate, Legacy, realms. I'm sure that doesn't make sense, so let me explain:

Say you want to play Classic WoW, so you choose the base version of the game, and your realm, let's say Illidan. When you log in, you will be playing in the old world, and only with other players in that iteration of the game. However, you're on the same realm with everyone else, Illidan, but you're phased out to only be playing with those players in your phase, thus preserving the immersion that would be nonexistent if trying to play with level 85 or 110 characters running around with updated stats and gear that you can't obtain (obviously this would only exist Vanilla-> Wrath, Cata-> current). Adding onto this, once you hit 60, you would have an option to continue on your journey or to stay and experience the content. If you choose to stay, you're playing there, able to enter old Naxx, using the old PvP honor system, gear has old stat values, old everything, including the arduous process of leveling to 60. If you choose to continue, you would be phased into the 61-70 (Burning Crusade) group, and play with other people that either chose to level as you did and moved on, *OR* chose to level 1-60 in the Burning Crusade phase with the increased experience from quests, level 30 mounts that were intruduced in 2.4.3, additional quests, etc. By having phases, that eliminates the factor of having players that are a higher level than your experience allows running around you, and allows each player to play how they want to.

"But, Moosen, what if I want to level fast, and have my achievements?" Choose a Wrath starting point or beyond, you will be playing with the players in your phase/expansion and have your shiny achievement points, etc.

*Example: 2 players decide to level 1-110, but both in different fashion.
- Player 1 wants to level through the content as quickly as possible to get to the utmost current content, so when he logs in, he chooses Legion, and levels his character via RDF from 1-100 and then hits Broken Shore.
- Player 2 wants to take his time, level the old way, as he did before, and play with other players that share his choice of playstyle. So he levels 1-60 via Classic/Vanilla, runs to 40, slow mount to well past 60 until he has farmed his gold for his epic mount, raided to AQ/Naxx with his fellow guildies. Once he is ready, he and his guild (or himself alone) can choose to move on to the next set of content, The Burning Crusade. There, they would be playing with others who are choosing to play in that version of the game, and so on.

*Issues: I'm aware that there would be issues with this. Starting off, there would have to be a client that has all versions of the game, so that players could effortlessly move through content. Also, each character would need to be locked to the content they're at, such as when Player 2 moves to TBC, he can no longer play with players in Vanilla content, and Player 1 can only ever play with other players in Legion and beyond. Another issue is that of achievements, textures, new models, and other QoL additions. Would the older versions use the new models? would there be a way to turn that off? Would Vanilla/TBC be allowed to have achievements, or have those disabled until they moved forward to Wrath or higher? I'm sure it would also be a task to be able to link each character of each phase to the databases needed for each expansion being played. Would there be a way to simply overwrite/switch the character to the new database upon deciding to move on? Patch progression: would each expansion start from the beginning and move forward with each patch, or simply open at its latest successful implementation and let players play from there? - with the latter, in order to keep "progression" feeling alive, each character could be locked to each tier until they've cleared it, only then allowing them to move forward.

Anyway, that's it. Hopefully it was understandable, maybe it could peak some of your interests. Leave some replies to tell me what you think.