Can you please give us a server that has a few GMs on it that actively ban botters, gold buyers / sellers, and griefers from the server?
There should be at least one place where Blizzard values the experience of it’s customers over raw numbers of subs.
yeah, that’s the dream.
right now the closest there is to this is the mankrik cluster on classic era, imo 
Go back in time.
Or play on a private server. Most have GMs who actually police the game.
Many of them sell items in a store. Player X doesn’t need to risk bans buying gold when the $100 they were going to spend anyway…was in the store.
Which is fine. F2P has bills to pay for the operators. Internet bills, and such. The dudes who pay for armour sets and items pay the money to keep the servers paid for. Freeloaders get their free game, win win.
I just started on Mankrik, it’s been a great experience so far!
I sadly quit playing Anni. The cheating/botting/exploiting is out of control. I had a lot of fun playing there though.
What is special about Mankrik?
the culture is more chill than whitemane imo
No most private servers do not have any sort of store. They can end up getting sued that way if you make any money off of it at all.
Warmane and ascension say hi…
They’ve been long lived thorns in the side of wow lol.
Really the only version of Classic worth playing is Era.
If you want a really chill community, try the Atiesh cluster. Or the RP realms.
I can’t help you with GMs but I can say there’s a place with players who just enjoy playing the game and aren’t obsessed with min max culture, gdkp, boosting, meta bs. It may not be for everyone but we’re out here. Four years strong. I’ve been saying this for a few years but you have to be the change you want to see. You have to build the communities you want to be a part of. Blizzard isn’t going to do it. The player base at large isn’t gonna do it.
Build.
It’s quite unfortunate (and dumb) that Blizz disabled transfers in Era…other than free ones off lower pop realms.
Most people don’t want to start from scratch.
It truly is. We’ve been hitting them hard to reverse this accidental disablement of the Paid Transfer Service.
There’s no coincidence it suddenly disappeared the day Anniversary launched and without any notice. Only getting confirmation from Blue Post saying it was to save us consumers from a money trap. I digress.
Regardless, we’ve continued to have new player intake, and have people leveling, or joining via HC still. I don’t disagree at all that people don’t WANT to level again, or that they’d prefer to transfer their existing toons. But then again you have the majority of Classic players literally leveling again on Anniversary so I’m not sure that’s 100% accurate either.
At least with Era, you know your time investment isn’t going anywhere. Era forever 
Sorry brother the way people play the game has changed, we can’t unring that bell
Anyone who thinks Blizz cares about players falling into a ‘money trap’ hasn’t been paying attention over the years. If they really cared about this, why not just make all server transfers on Era free? Put a cooldown on it and there you go.
The reason it’s disabled is because they didn’t want to allow transfers on the Anniversary realms and they can’t be bothered to separate between those servers and Era.
Yep.
they’ve had issues in the past with this. Like the one time for some reason OCE servers allowed a cross era version transfer with NA for some reason.
and the basically R14’s were in the younger version’s AV. And having a good old time there too.
What I didn’t get was that was only specific to OCE. Only they saw that transfer option. In theory OCE and NA are all the same code and webinterface on service page.
OCE’s only difference is a proper day/night cycle to the region that I’d see. that should not have allowed that transfer.
I’ve been having a good time getting that nostalgia hit on Anniversary but I agree the sheer number of bots and utter lack of action from Blizz is disconcerting. Most are not even subtle.
I do wonder, however, why folks on Anniversary seem to be in such a hurry.
This is one of the reasons I felt an addon free server experience might be good. Would cut down on people following the dotted line and less cracks to pry.
Also layering should be level based to cut down on power leveling ooooh.
Because these people don’t like Vanilla. They don’t even want to play Vanilla. They want to ‘beat’ Vanilla.
So they buy boosts to skip 95% of the game and then obsess over world buffs and consumables to make easy content even easier. So they can tear through it and log off as quickly as possible.
It’s actually rather sad.
As long as theres Dual Spec.