From my viewpoint (customer) a very risky business decision. You will half the community of a sort of healthy game "Fallensword" and create a second "server" with the same game but with updated everything.
From my very humble perspective, it would be better to focus on making that beta app but at some point make it possible to Port over at least the complete character. Im not talking bout achievements or other things. But I doubt any of those big wallet whales would loose their attachement to their old account for the sake of something new where investments are mandatory just like in FS.
Same happened to a familiar game in which i got banned a year ago for using a keyboard mouse with macros short known as "RS"
heres what happened when they pulled the same thing off.
2 identical games were created. One that had the graphics of 2007 and everything with the same game dynamic but with new accounts and from scratch. Then there was the already 17 year old game that had the newest graphics the most content and the most players. It also was bot free to a point where you would not notice them. Game was still much critized because they did so many updates and not all of them were aknowledged as good.
so heres how it looks now and I can say that this is not the path I would like to see Fallensword fal into.
I hope you come up with a solution that incorporates both games in a way that they may at least interact with eachother or we would come to a crossroad where the game will part its gaming community and influx of players will be divided for the worst.
I dont think it would be very wise as a (developer) to splitt your community in such a way that it may even affect your long term monetary income from milking us (the customer). You did alot of ventures with investing in branches like Eldevin and such. Theres only so much shots you can take before you have to reload the barrel. And it seems you should think about the cash cow Fallensword in a way to still keep your already paying playerbase and aquire new ones at the same time.
Options like:
- Promotional codes for new players only
- New player Ugrade draws 3 players from all the verified players who register in at that month are drawn for awesome upgrades for each starting month one time only.
- Epic quests and even richer content for lvl 1-300
- Random events for each player similar to the daily quests
youre the devs you gotta have some ideas how to improve a steady cash cow.