(Mar 4, 2026 12:44 AM)Pοιsonlεaf Wrote:  Knowing Blizzard they might just end up fucking up and try to bring out a WOW2 that wont connect to the playerbase.
They haven't been in touch with their playerbase for a long time. (You think you do but you don't)
Hence the sheer amount of private hosted wow servers that draw in a vast amount of players and personally I don't think even metzen can help them out with that. He does/did great work but where blizzard is at right now... idk.
This might very well be the end of the world.
(of warcraft)

(Mar 4, 2026 12:44 AM)Pοιsonlεaf Wrote:  Knowing Blizzard they might just end up fucking up and try to bring out a WOW2 that wont connect to the playerbase.
They haven't been in touch with their playerbase for a long time. (You think you do but you don't)
Hence the sheer amount of private hosted wow servers that draw in a vast amount of players and personally I don't think even metzen can help them out with that. He does/did great work but where blizzard is at right now... idk.
This might very well be the end of the world.
(of warcraft)

(Mar 4, 2026 12:29 PM)Tyr Wrote:  What comes after? The same thing they've been doing; running the game into the ground while catering to a younger population. I am disgusted with them actually.

I asked myself this question when SL came out. I said well, this must be the last one, they are running out of content. Spoke to people who said the same thing when TBC first came out in 07. They'll just keep pumping out material whether it sucks or it does not.

What are your thoughts on Classic+? Lot of people were excited for it but with new announcements people are now a bit pissed.

---

They're EXTREMELY focused on making housing great right now from the people I speak to. I hear it's a lot of fun, just not for me.

The main servers (and trust me, I am definitely the one to know this more than anyone here and was involved in the creation of some that once upon a time had thousands playing) that even cause a minor dent in the population are the well scripted blizz-like ones such as Stormforge who have buuuucko bucks behind them, Firestorm and also Warmane represent a large amount of players that the entire wow emulation community represents now. It's not what it used to be where you could loadup XT100 and choose a server out of 250 that have active people on them. The ones that survived had loyal players, staff, and a well made voting ecosystem. Turtle WoW will also always be popular because they priortized twinking as a niche. There is also a few developers I am aware of that are working on a TBC server to rival Netherwing from Stormforge but I do not even think their realm is very popular. 3.3.5a will always take the cake. Fun servers are dead and it essentially crippled the niche I rooted my life within over the last 6 years.

Like HF, I once ran a community I was proud of too. It was thriving for many years and we had it work symbiotically with ingame rewards to encourage people to post on the forum. Awards in Invision Power Board would carry over from in-game and vise-versa. It was a well setup server. Overhead eventually becomes too much, donations slow down and cease and desist notices become a nuisance.

Discord also hurt many servers badly because people don't understand that the medium sized servers had a specific nostalgia attached to it where the social aspects of it all (imagine Hack Forums and those who are regulars here know each other's names but it is attached to a game; eventually social groups form and this is where many of the successful servers today prevailed back 10-15 years ago.

Consider Firestorm, I remember being a GM there and literally hosting events for players. This human interaction between staff doesn't exist in the original game and never will. It's something I think Blizz always screwed up with over the years as they had very stringent rules for their game master's.

I am honestly surprised that Stormforge has such a large grip on the emulation community to the point where I haven't even seen a select few group of developers getting together in the communities I run with to create TBC content via SQL or even full fledged CMS's based on TBC for resale on other forums and stuff. The fall of AC Web did also not help with this, however, there are still some great sites out there.

https://www.wow-mania.com/start

this could also come after for you if you plan to get spicy ;)

(Mar 4, 2026 02:37 PM)Au Jus Demon Wrote:  I agree honestly. I mainly play on private servers these days, aside from getting dragged back into TBC again recently.

At this point it feels like Blizzard has a management problem on top of devs that just don’t seem very interested in making the kind of game players actually want anymore.


Funny enough my current group of friends and I all originally met working on a private server called Eternal-WoW. We were mainly the team managing Remorse, their 255 fun server lol funny enough. We always joked about throwing it back up someday just for fun since we still had the player and world databases after Eternal shut down.

Those really were the good days though. Just ran one 3.3.5a client and swapped the realmlist depending on what server I wanted to play. I definitely spent some time on WoW Mania years ago as well.

For a while I messed around with some of the wildcard stuff on Ascension too. I even checked out their Conquest of Azeroth realm recently to try the new classes they added. Interesting concept, but that server is basically built around swiping now.

I will give Blizzard’s Classic+ a shot if they actually do something interesting with it. I never tried Season of Discovery, but a lot of people seemed to enjoy it. At the end of the day though, whenever I get the WoW itch I almost always end up back on a private server.

(Mar 4, 2026 06:17 PM)Tyr Wrote:  Oh I remember you guys very vaguely, you were somewhat medium sized, had a nice mall. PEAK days though because people were hopping from server to server back then testing them out too a lot more than they would now

Haven't tried SoD myself, the only thing I have enjoyed more than anything has been Classic Hardcore but the 1 death thing will screw you up once you die at like 35-40 or 50 haha

(Mar 4, 2026 09:54 PM)Au Jus Demon Wrote:  That's the one thing keeping me from playing anything hardcore. I can't see myself putting all that time into leveling in Classic just to start over.

(Mar 6, 2026 05:18 PM)Tyr Wrote:  It's fun if you got 1-2 friends IRL that play and you guys get together for lower level dungeons, etc. Leveling and not overdoing it is key. I had the same mentality until I tried it for my first time. Eventually I got pissed dying at like 15 and decided to take it much more serious on that particular character. I had a ton of fun until it like "whelp, gg" at 35 when I died to some random pack of mobs. It's like death is always around the corner if you aren't locked in.

What was super fun to me was doing Deadmines and then running out with 4 mobs chasing you from the back entrance to the front with 30hp left after someone pulls on accident, seeing them die in your party and following IRL friends to jumping through the portal at the last minute before death.

The way I see it is, 1-30 is fun but after that dying is brutal looking back at all the time you had spent. It's definitely an experience unlike any other though and would highly recommend if you ever feel like testing it out one day. But having a group of friends is really what makes Hardcore enjoyable. Sucks solo.

(Mar 6, 2026 05:41 PM)Au Jus Demon Wrote:  Yeah that honestly sounds like it would be way more fun with a group. The dungeon stories like that are probably the whole point of Hardcore.

I think the thing that always stopped me was exactly what you said though. Once you get past that 30-40 range the time investment starts getting pretty serious, so losing a character there would hurt lol.

That’s kind of why Classic works so well though. The leveling itself is its own game, not just something you rush through to reach endgame.

(Mar 6, 2026 05:43 PM)Tyr Wrote:  Well put. A lot of people enjoy the leveling aspect of the game which was killed off bad after WOTLK imo. The content now is scripted for a much younger audience than people who have played for decades or even less tbh. Blizz will be blizz tho