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.
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.