Repairs: gold and a weapon for the broke

Characters without gold kept their broken weapon or pieces. A well-off guildmate now mails them what they need to repair, a disarmed character buys a weapon with honor in the meantime, and training no longer takes the repair money. The Stormwind PvP vendor, actually unreachable, is set aside.

The finding

At the end of the break, 357 level 80 characters wore at least one broken piece, and 306 could not pay for the repair, often for a few silver coins.
A character with a broken weapon, penniless and with nothing to sell, had no way out: "bare-handed" hunting sent it against monsters it could not beat.
Training paid for its lessons with the money meant for repairs. In Northrend, lessons that no trainer on the continent teaches blocked the money reserve.
A Stormwind PvP vendor was chosen although no path led to him from a portal's arrival point, and the module took that failure for an arrival.

The fixes

Guild help:
a well-off member mails a broke guildmate one and a half times what is missing, up to 10 gold and 10% of its own purse;
the gold arrives at once, and the broke character collects it first;
only autonomous players give and receive.
Backup weapon: a character whose weapon is broken and unaffordable buys with honor the best PvP weapon within its reach, even of a lower level.
Training: lessons leave the repair money aside, and those that no trainer on the continent teaches no longer block the reserve.
Broke and disarmed: it only hunts prey matching its real strength that drops money, otherwise it does not hunt.
Vendors: an impossible path is no longer taken for an arrival. An unreachable or missing vendor is set aside for 24 hours, and for everyone once two characters have failed.
Mailboxes: those in enemy towns are avoided.

Checked on the test server

Eight characters copied from production, five broke ones with broken gear, two well-off ones and one for the vendor, copied at the same time onto two test servers, one with the old version and one with the new, for 40 minutes:

broke characters armed again: from 1 to 3;
gold gifts: from 0 to 3. Two were collected and spent on repairs at once, two minutes between sending and the weapon repaired;
backup weapon: a rogue without a donor in its guild went to buy a High Warlord's Razor with honor;
partial repairs for lack of money: from 2 to 0;
deaths: 4 against 6, one of them in front of an enemy mailbox, fixed since. The gap is too small to conclude on such a small sample.

Control with eight characters from the old continents, 25 minutes, same copies on both sides: no death instead of 2, and 4 quests turned in instead of 2. Fewer monsters killed, as catching up (training at maximum level, weapon lessons, honor purchases) takes up these first minutes.

The trial revealed an old flaw, fixed in this batch: a Horde priestess who went to collect the gold of a gift died in front of the mailbox of an Alliance camp, the closest one.

No crash.

Still open

A character without a guild or honor, with nothing to sell, still has no way out.
The arrival point of the Stair of Destiny portal, under the Stormwind mage quarter, is cut off from the rest of the city for navigation: a character arriving there gets stuck.

Deployment

The new module version is installed on the server. The autonomous players stay stopped: these fixes will be in place for the restart.