Please please please for Varsoon limit the starting cities to Qeynos and Freeport. Unlock them when appropriate in the timeline!
Why? So we can have 12 instances of The Graveyard and 5 Commonlands instead of 12 Darklight Woods on launch?
Kelethin is part of a later xpac, so won't be there at launch. So you got 33% of what you want. Grats!
I'm pretty certain Kelethin was available at launch for Kaladim. I'm fine with having x instances of the starting zones, that's what the instance system is there fore. There's going to be a bunch anyway, but the newer ones aren't classic and have a lot of perks that Freeport/Qeynos don't get. The idea of getting the newbie villages back was for people to use them.
Kelethin wasn't available at launch because EoF and therefore GFay wasn't available. I'd also like to relive Freeport/Qeynos only but I think there would be consequences. One issue I can think of with blocking these zones is that many holiday events use them with the assumption they exist. So during Frostfell and stuff, without access to Halas, we'd miss out on event content and get stuck with incomplete collections. I'm sure there are a handful of features, including betrayal quests, teleport options, and crafting lines that could cause soft-lock issues if these zones were simply "turned off". I'd rather the devs spend whatever time they have working on more important things. For example: tuning T5 raid encounters better than they were on Kaladim, improving/separating loot tables, adding more relevant/balanced loot items in heroic zones, fixing broken class abilities affected by TLE code, reworking hunters quests to be less boring/awful, etc. Neriak/Halas really only affect characters until level 20. After that, they don't really offer any kind of advantage. These zones don't include level 50 content that change how Vanilla's endgame plays out. It's also all solo content, so if you don't want to play in Neriak/Halas then simply don't pick them.
I'm pretty sure this is the main reason they're left in. They're mostly irrelevant after level 20, and you can basically pretend they don't exist for the most part. They do however, in my opinion, provide a more coherent questing/leveling experience for 1-20 than Qeynos/Freeport do. As far as keeping things within the "spirit" over the server go, I'd say this is a pretty low priority one.
Have they fixed the quest xp progression in Halas and Neriak so that your quests don't turn red on you? That's the real problem I've seen with those zones. The quest progression wasn't really calibrated for the slower xp gains that TLE servers generally see. I usually don't use them out of personal preference, but the experience can be confusing if you aren't expecting it. Either way, once everyone hits 20 they get funneled back into classic content, and they don't have any heroic content so it's not really detracting from the two low level dungeons.
