Was there a coordinated effort via forums for everyone to move to or vacate these servers? or did it happen naturally? I understand the argument that a PvE server has little reason to have a separate faction that isn’t helping the other progress, but it seems impossible that no one would go against the grain and start their own side there, especially when there are other servers that are completely horde dominated. Why have more people not migrated to these large faction imbalance servers to make up the other side?
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Cant speak for pagle but my server kirtonos went the same way. Things were all pretty balanced until p2 when my guild at the time had a monopoly on the world bosses and were camping literally every highly trafficked area since our GM was pushing for the first possible HWL.
The first couple “hardcore” alliance guilds like “The high council” transferred off instead of trying to contest us for world bosses, the monopoly continued and more and more allies transfered as things tipped farther out of their favor.
By naxx phase I think we were 65/35 or so and with tbc incoming the rest of the allies vacated knowing that they would get stomped in the open world.
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The same way it happened way back when.
One major guild leaves, bunch of people follow.
One server has a “cool” guild, or a streamer, everyone follows.
As more people go, people start to panic that they’ll be left behind and leave.
I played on Korgath for a very long time and it used to be one of a very limited number of balanced PVP servers. Then < Gentlemens Club > left the server and it killed the horde pop almost overnight as everyone left
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It seems odd that of all the servers there are only a few that have both high population and sizeable factions on either side. I don’t know how accurate the player population stat tracking sites are, but as far as my time out in the world goes, I’ve observed very few people out in the world on Horde Benediction currently which is listed around a 5k population. Also it can be borderline dead even in major cities at early hours of the morning.
Pagle which is something like 8000 population seems to have active low level players in most zones at all hours of the day, but still has a hard time finding dungeon groups in pre-tbc areas.
I think you need to have above a specific player count for a faction for zones to remain populated. 5000 seems to be too low, while 8000 is an improvement, so maybe 16-20k would ensure an active world.
You think 5k raiders is dead? Try sub 1k raiders, and only 9k postings on the auction house…
5,000 is friggen huge, and far beyond even what a full pop server was back in the day.
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People want to play on a majority. When you do this, you create a minority on the other side, which no one wants to play on. People then abandon the minority for a majority somewhere else. This downward spiral ensures that it’ll only get worse.
Btw, people were carving up realms before the game even launched. They had realm A picked for alliance, realm B for horde, and stupidly obsessed over where streamers planned to go. NO ONE (beyond myself I guess) actually cares about balance. They don’t want a 50/50 realm. They want to play the 75%… meaning a 25% is created on the other side. You can’t have a majority and balance at same time. A scale doesn’t work that way.
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They’re not comparable in any way. 5,000 raiding characters doesn’t mean the server is more populated than original Full TBC servers. My current Medium pop server most definitely seems less populated than my Medium pop original TBC server.
I mean I’m honestly just reporting based on my observations within the world and my own playtime on the ground. Of Benediction’s 5k horde the majority are in outland.
Here’s a /who taken in the last 20 minutes of almost all of eastern kingdoms including most of the dungeons. I left out UBRS, LBRS, and Uldaman as they had 0 players.
imgurDOTcom/a/lDFy1ap
It totals to 192 players, with at least 71+ of those being over 60 most of which are dungeon boosters and gold farmers, most heavily in Scarlet Monastery and Strathholme.
So if we estimate that Kalimdor is even triple that, 4,232 of the 5000 population would have to be in outland or raid logged.
When I played on Gorefiend back in Vanilla I have no idea what our server numbers were, but I was able to get PvP queues in either 5 minutes or 20 minutes on a slow day, and dungeon groups were always ongoing in almost every zone. I would find people everywhere while leveling an alt, even in alliance territory. It was certainly a lot more active than this.
Boosts killed the old world.
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Since it is a PvE server it does not matter much, but if Blizzard really wanted they could merge Pagle with Mankrik. They are both US East and PvE servers.
You’d end up with a near perfect 50-50% population split. Not too shabby.
However it would be as populated as that huge PvP server. Not sure anyone would want it to happen afterall, heh.
I saw a Horde while farming some nodes in Searing Gorge the other day and was like… “Cool, a Horde!” 
I think we have Horde on Pagle, just maybe not enough contributing logs to count towards the stats?
I understand why faction migration happens on a PvP server, I don’t really know on a PvE server. Except maaaaaaybe the above mention of world bosses and being outfarmed by a faction? Though that applies to both sides. I was raiding during classic and my guild did pretty good in terms of progression, but we never saw a world boss kill because they were just so farmed that we didn’t bother. So yea, I dunno!
Not sure if you mean paid boosts or not, but I actively play low level alts on Pagle and I see plenty of people doing runs. There’s a surprising number of people leveling on any given day if I do a /who in the zone I happen to be in. Of course, there’s also a lot of people paying for gold boosts too, so if you just meant boosts in general that certainly counts in favour of that.
Still though, on the few occasions where I’ve pugged a dungeon (I usually run with friends), I’ve actually had no trouble getting a group. As feral DPS, no less. I think boost have an impact, I think playing leveling content in a game that’s been out for over 2 years has a larger impact.
The old world content was pretty sparse back in 2006 - 2008 on my server too 
It feels bad because it’s so true. I’m struggling to get help for group quests, and forget about dungeons.
I just love this darn server so much.
you answered your own question.
Pagle is an important human, so it kind of makes sense that it’s an alliance server. Mankrik is an important orc, so it makes sense that it’s a horde server.
Besides that let’s be honest. Outside of wPvP, there’s no reason to have the other faction on your server. All that having them on your server does is restrict your access to the servers resources.
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Every server has a story. The people who were on those servers and were paying attention have that story.
I agree the most with answers that say things like one of the big guilds left and a snowball started. That’s a big part of a lot of the stories. Faction balance is a part of it on PVP server stories although there is often more to it - I will say though that right now with the way the raid entrances are set up for T5 and with the way the TK graveyard is, there are guilds that transferred off due to a fear that PVP as members of the outnumbered side will hamper their PVE progression - even if these guilds don’t come out and say it.
In general for PVP and PVE - Looking for greener pastures due to recruiting issues, grouping issues, AH issues. These are causes too and happen more and more as people leave.
I do not have the story of Pagle but I do know that many of the horde just moved to Mankrik to be part of a larger population due to the issues I just mentioned. Some tried to stick it out but left anyway.
Even when a server becomes a single faction that’s not a good thing for its overall health. Look at what’s happened to Incendius and Stalagg. The final Stalagg horde just moved over to my server…
TBCC has killed off many servers. The dev teams obsession with keeping layers instead of having a goal to remove them over time as well as continuing to allow transfers to these huge servers have been the primary causes of a lot of dead servers so now we have these huge disjointed servers that feel like Retail. This is not a good thing for those who are playing TBCC because we want things like servers communities.
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why would you want to just kill 2 servers you dont play in?
This has been the end state for most servers since WoW has existed.
Players want to play with others, and the best way to do that in a 2 faction system is to stack 1 faction.
Because people found out that their memories of playing on a PvP server the first time around were looked at through rose tinted goggles, and that PvE is the way to go server wise. And then they figured out that unless you play on a high pop server the economy is kinda crap, like there’s less goods on the AH and a lot less low level BoE’s to gear your alts/twinks with, and it takes 3 hours to find a SFK group verses maybe 15-20 minutes on a high pop server if you can navigate the LFG chat which is moving at 90 mph.
And finally, with said high pop servers, you want your faction to be the one that’s high pop for all the reasons above, so that means people have designated a couple servers for each faction so that they can get groups for content. ( Cross server LFG would solve this, but people think it’s the anti-christ so you have mega servers instead). Pick your poison, Dungeon finder or mega servers that are one sided. Player made problem/solution.
And as a side reason, for people who like to Twink low level characters, the default server is Mankrik. This ensures that there are plenty of guilds for such a thing, and the Auction house has more Best in slot items for that sorta thing than other servers. Might take you a month for a pair of bracers to pop up that you need, when on Mankrik there’s 5 pairs, being flipped ofc by someones alt. Beats not being able to obtain those items verses spending a pretty penny for them instead.
The horde from pagle left for mankrik before the aq gates opening event. They said there wouldn’t be enough horde to complete the opening of the gates or no horde would get scarab lord due to the pop of the alliance on the server.
So they were welcomed on mankrik and were cool peeps. I ended up grinding honor with some of them.
Pagle was really planned before servers launched. People knew that guilds were going Alliance, and very few horde guilds were around. It further nose dived later …
Same as Mankrik … when it came up after the initial servers launched… most people going and posting guilds were Horde…
But those are PVE servers… which is really not an issue. The PVP servers starting dying in p2 when people quit because of majority forces in OW PVP.