Trinitycore has always done well striving to achieve the best Blizzlike experience possible. But lets be honest it can’t hope to keep pace with AAA fully staffed and supported game developers.
Where Trinitycore falls short is a good player experience. Saying you don’t support private servers or non-blizzlike hacks is fine for official branches and lofty goals of doing things the right way, but it leaves people wanting to enter this community for recreation and fun out in the cold. The player experience is pretty bad in many ways. I’ve had to enable GM account level on account to force quest completion just to get out of starter zones or finish things that aren’t scripted or don’t work properly. Even with GM commands I had a DK get stuck in a phased state where even dropping the quest wouldn’t remove the aura leaving me phased and unable to do anything. I could have figured out how to edit the database and remove the aura eventually but it was a chain of bad experiences with gameplay that made it painfully obvious that the core wasn’t viable for “normal fun”.
I’m sure WotLK is more viable, but I played the hell out of that years ago and leveled alts through it many times on retail since then. The newer expansions are much less polished.
I gave up setting up my own server and ventured into private servers where they’re largely parasites on the work you do here. I doubt they contribute all that much back to this project and much of what they “fix” doesn’t meet the standards to even be included here. You end up with competing private servers who are paying developers to advance their own profitability.
You should really consider having more branches that support all expansions whether you have sniffed packet data or not. At least have a place where there is a core and database for expansions where people wanting them can contribute fixes. You should also have unsupported branches where fixes that don’t meet standards are still included as “at least it works” so there is a player experience that isn’t completely broken. It seems to me it would draw more people into the project who could try to improve things that aren’t up to standards while still being able to choose supported branches for excellent standards or unsupported branches for better gameplay experience.
I quit playing live servers because I didn’t like BfA. I still have an active sub but I think the best gameplay was Legion 7.2.5. Most changes from 7.3 and since I don’t even like. As far as I know there is no project supporting 7.2.5. But I found a private server that does for now. I’m sure they’ll eventually move to 7.3 and maybe beyond. But for now I’ve found something fun with better gameplay than any EMU project I’ve tried.
Not bashing this project. What you’ve accomplished is nothing less than amazing. But from a gameplay perspective it’s sorely lacking and doesn’t encourage or promote dabbling in your own server when you know you can never get gameplay like you can on private servers where they exploit the work Trinitycore does, profit from it, and pay their own developers. The work they do is kept in-house because they’re competing with other private servers. It never gets released back to the community, or much of it doesn’t, because it either doesn’t meet the standards to be included in supported branches or would benefit their competition.