Was doing some digging because I was bored and occasionally stumble back on wow classic for the pvp. The largest populated sever in all of modern wow is Area 52 which has 18k, 2nd is stormrage with 14k, third is Illidan with just under 14k population and 4th is Jubei’Thos with just over 10k per wowprogress.com, those are the only servers with over 10k active users currently there’s 3 servers with 9k, 1 with 8.8k, 2 with 7.6k. So on the top ten servers in modern there’s just under 109k active players, we can safely assume about 200k overall and being extremely generous maybe 250k.
In comparison per ironforge.pro numbers from 4/9/25 to 4/15/25, Classic SoD had 70k active users for what is basically wow vanilla plus. The 4 main servers have 24.5k, 22k, 12.5k and 10k population, again we see 4 servers with over 10k population. But that’s not all folks! WoW anniversary had 96k active users with the 4 main servers at 30k, 27.6k, 17k, and 16k, again 4 over 10k. And last but not least we have WoW classic cata which (at its lowest point currently) still has 111.7k active users. None of the servers in cata classic are over 10k however. What’s interesting is between the wow classic series there’s ~277.7k active users. Even with cross play overlap there still more activity on wow classic than current. This is even aside from Cata classic being in a lull until MoP releases in August.
There is no way I would go play current WoW, they lost me at BFA and from there all they did was add more racial diversity, more feminism and more gay and trans stuff.
Wow classic is tempting but not going back. What is the point if it will eventually lead to BFA?
As for active players, the numbers seem low but I assume it is still highly profitable.
Hey now, who doesn't want to travel to a new land/expansion and almost immediately be greeted by two gay dragons surveying a river, and then almost moments later be greeted by two gay humans who are a main feature of the new crafting system and you will probably run to every single week for the weekly quest one has in the capital?
Also look at how progressive the Horde now is, their racial leader for the new hype class is totally non binary despite the entire lizard from being extremely androgynous so the only way to pull that off is to pair a female sounding voice with a sometimes seen male elf body when not in lizard form, which is both dumb and retarded even by Blizzard's own standards because surely they should feel comfortable in their own body so why do all the lizards need to hide in human/elf form then?
About the only thing good in Dragonflight is some of the music as is standard for a lot of things including Tron 2 but then that literally had Daft Punk do the music for the film AND star as themselves in the actual movie so difficult to fault.
It's genuinely terrible in every dimension.
They've always gamed the sub count. I wouldn't go back to WoW after they fucked over multiple areas.
That’s kinda the point of SoD which is almost an alternate WoW timeline for vanilla plus. At least with wow classic just reaching MoP there’s still MoP which was at least fun, WoD which was meh, and Legion which was the best one since wrath. That’s 6+ years and you can grind play tokens pretty easily once you’re high tier. Anniversary is just plain vanilla wow as well. I’m betting that wow is going to pump out one more woke expac where the playerbase completely crumbles into classic which will massively drop during WoD. This might make a wake up moment where they do Wrath with a SoD and start over completely, but I doubt they’ll learn why their active base collapsed and double down on gay shit while people play classic because it’s doesn’t have it.
I actually really enjoyed BfA. I can't put my finger on it, but I probably spent as much time on it as any expansion.
Shadowlands was just garbage.
Dragonflight SEEMED like it should have been a return to form, but I just hated it.
I started War Within and haven't completed a single zone. It just doesn't do it for me anymore. I've played my main since the originally classic. It's sad.
I am, however, playing on the classic realms, I played on the BC realms, and I'm definitely going to play on Pandaria as I missed about 1/2 that expansion the first time around.
During BFA I noticed the change towards a more feminist story and I just knew it was corrupted and I didn't bother with it.
Classic was a ton of fun but I had to cut it off do to being addictive during that period of my life and now I just don't care since it will lead to the same globohomo slop
So, off the top of my head, Warcraft 1 had a handful of female characters: Garona, the half-orc spy. Ok, that's the only one I remember unless you count the sexy female water elementals.
Warcraft 2 added a handful of female characters. Elven archers. Alleria, the elven ranger. That's it. (Alexstrazsa the dragon I guess counts.)
Warcraft 3 did add quite a few. Tyrande, Maiev, Jaina, Sylvanas, Naga witches, etc.
WoW was fairly balanced from the beginning. Sylvanas, Tyrande, and Jaina are three of the most prominent characters to this day.
I don't know if BfA went feminist. The Little-Mermaid-Ursula monster character was annoying. Jaina going full Elsa from Frozen was annoying. But, Drustvar was fantastic. I enjoyed Tiragarde sound. I liked Mechagon island. Nazjatar world raid events were great fun.
BfA was the last expansion I really played much of.
Sylvanas was the worst, Jaina I did not like because it disrespected her father. And if I remember there was this smaller faction with mostly ugly human women I had to do quests with. It also seemed to have a huge focus on women.
It's been some time since I played so all the details elude me but the tone shift was clear compared to the rest of the expansions. It was a shame after Legion, I enjoyed Legion a lot but it was also a good way to end wow.
Sylvanas was pretty bad in BfA, 100%. Jaina...eh, she was always a bigger character than her father. Blizzard games always, ALWAYS had twist after twist after twist and betrayal after betrayal, dating back to the RTS days. That way you get your human vs human, human vs night elf, human vs undead, human vs orc, etc. Totally contrived for gameplay reasons. I thought they did a pretty good job of handling this in BfA. It was more or less Jaina coming home to make amends.
Yes, FUGLY females, and that trend has continued. The Kul Tiran allied race. Men pretty ugly too, tbf.
Legion was awesome and was very much an end to the Warcraft cycle.
Do you know of a single private servers that isn't run by trannies?
afaik there isn't a single WoW server where you can role-play as a racist paladin
Depends on what you're looking for, but if you're mostly looking for a nostalgia trip I'd just say spin up your own to start. There's a number of repacks out there that you can just download and run on your local machine and invite your friends onto it to play with you (or just play with bots which are probably about as competent as the average WoW player - they do decently on rotations but are pretty bad at "don't stand in the fire").
Obviously that doesn't work if you're looking to have a large, vibrant community though.
Finding the right repack then getting it to work then finding the bots and a database of all the old item codes and commands is a little harder. You would also need the right patches for the specific game version.
If you play classic cata it’s very fu woke.
There are some that are saying the total player count is around 7 million, that would be depressing if true. I assume the actual players are around 2 millions that have accounts in all versions but it does mean that Blizzard is doing extremely well financially.
Even those numbers won't be entirely accurate as there will be various private servers of varying size. Might not be much but it's still going to be something.
That’s conjecture from a paid wow vtuber using supposed numbers “leaked” to him from blizzard. It would require over 95% of all subscribers to be inactive over the course of a year. 2 million is even a stretch, if there wasn’t any crossover between wow modern and the classics it’s still under 600k active users in the past month.
One more thing to make me think that 7 milion number is fake is that when I search for the next expansion I get the first entry a video about: "Midnight Will Be The BIGGEST Expansion Ever! Old WoW Is BACK!"
You can't have Old WoW be considered good without saying current one is crap.
That sounds exactly like a Taliesin and Evitel video...the biggest Blizzard shills around. The WoW streamer/youtuber views across channels have absolutely dropped through the floorboards.
I've seen Reddit cheering about this but yea I have doubts. My WoW addict friend hasn't mentioned WoW and another who sometimes played mentioned just PvP. I think Blizzard overestimates how off-putting gay stuff is even to those that are on the left. Is one thing to virtue signal and an entire different thing to have it in the medium you consume.
One thing, I believe Ironforge.pro only takes into account raid logged individuals. If people raid without using logs or only PvP, they aren't accounted for.
You are right, but I also think your numbers are making massive assumptions.
Like, I play pretty regularly (I always come back because its free) and I don't appear on any lists there unless you directly search my name. I went to multiple spots where I would show in the list and I don't show at all. Likely because I don't raid in any real capacity or M+.
But what that tells me is that if you are casual enough, then whatever metric the site uses likely just doesn't pull you. Probably appearing in warcraft logs or something for them to pull your progress for the site.
So based on this, I'd wager a considerable amount of the casual playerbase wasn't factored into your numbers. Even most casuals do more M+ than I do to have pullable numbers, so its not off by like an absurd number, but still.
So I'd wager its only off by a chunk, but the relative distance between the various Classic Realms vs Retail is still accurate. Most of my friends moved to Classic and are still there, including a handful who only play Hardcore.
The main scrutiny for the wow modern was far lower than wow classic. To be considered in the wow modern you simply need to have logged into a 70+ account and be active in a guild that raided, in the wow classic it was raid logins per the week of 4/9-4/15. If you don’t appear you’re in very niche category per their own data.
I am in fact in a guild that does not raid, its simply a place to park for the handful of guild perks that still exist, so that tracks.
But again, I still don't think I'm a massively niche category. Plenty of people don't raid, are in guilds that don't raid or more importantly, only pug their raids. If that is the only metric, then it will miss probably even more than I thought, simply because the type of players who play retail is heavily biased towards "log in, do dailies/collection things" type players which is a playstyle that doesn't really exist until around Legion when it has enough content to justify itself.
This doesn't really change anything about your point, as the relative difference is probably still about the same, its just pedanticism about the numbers themselves. Which I'd say is still sub 1million if not sub 500k, but not quite 200-250k.
Though more to your point, Retail is a game of alts now and Blizzard is pushing people towards that harder and harder by the patch. Its likely that you are getting a lot of duplicate players who simply play their alts way too fucking much enough to make it seem like it would be more than one. I know a guy who has two full time raiding careers across two characters, for example.
It’s anyone in the guild even does raid finder or arena/rbg. Again you’d have to be extremely niche.
But I do raid finder, I even sometimes pug normal super casually, so clearly that isn't enough on its own to flag.
Both pretty much showcase that gaming really peaked over a decade ago, we just have been in a dei spiral since
I recently started playing classic anniversary with my friend and its a good throw back. I have zero interest in playing the other crap as I just enjoy the old stuff
Vanilla is just an overall good time to just lose yourself in exploring, questing and dungeoning.
It was probably the only time in the game that it didn't revolve around "endgame only" play. So you can just have lowkey, no schedule fun with friends without trouble.
I can't parse Cata or MoP classic. Just doesn't make sense. I know what they are trying to do. But no. SoD is an interesting experiment, it's pretty much classic+. Props for trying.
It's rather sad that I had more fun with Hoyoslop and GzDoom total conversions (Ashes Afterglow was amazing)