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.
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.