I don’t see any PvP or PvE mentions in their first comment?
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I couldn’t imagine playing anywhere other than Grobb. Like what’s the point it’s not even classic anywhere else it’s just a content hamster wheel.
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So yes… there certainly is a lot of socializing going on…but its hardly a community.
Classic servers were never intended to house 40K people on them. There is almost no community, everyone ninjas, steals. A stolen GDKP pot is incredibly common. They happen time and again.
you look around and its a thousand guilds youve never heard of, a bunch just to advertise twitch streams… and yeah. Its nothing like the community we had in classic vanilla.
I would also argue the reason PvE servers didnt collapse as hard is because they couldnt move to PvP servers where the real mega servers are. Even if they all collapsed into Pay-gle it would be peanuts compared to the monstrosity that is Benediction.
Look for a bunch of PvE servers to die to bene over the first few months of WOTLK without RDF.
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A couple of the top guilds moved off Pagle recently. It has a healthy population still, but it was noticed.
You make an excellent point. As someone who played all of classic then jumped into TBC only to quit a month later I can tell you exactly why I left.
My class was not considered “META”. I used that LFG bulletin addon and would spend hours on it trying to get groups for 5 man heroics. Eventually guild mates would take me so I could at least complete the daily. Then I would wind up doing absolutely terrible DPS. I went from being a top DPS dealer in my guild to being a expose armor debuff bot.
I would then come to the forums to complain requesting buffs to my class and was told “You should have known your class would suck in TBC” and "Just reroll to a good class’.
Since I couldn’t find groups and guilds only wanted one for raids to expose armor I decided I was done with the game and quit.
Only came back to WOTLK because 1. New servers give me a chance to start over fresh with a bunch of other likeminded people and 2. Random Dungeon finder so I would never experience that garbage I experienced in TBC. I reactivated my account. Paid a 6 month sub and bought dragonflight expansion.
Then Blizzard pulled the rug out from underneath me by saying WOTLK would not have RDF.
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I leveled my Paladin to 70 just so I would be able to tank random dungeons with friends. It’s pretty disappointing that the same people who are responsible for what retail WoW is today think they know better than the people who originally made the game great.
The reason RDF was added is because they wanted to get more people to do dungeons and wanted to reduce the friction required to participate. Their LFG tool is not a suitable replacement, and its failure is certain to lose plenty of players to questing fatigue who would have otherwise reached max level.
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This is an understatement lol.
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Correct. Since TBC and badge gear they wanted catch-up mechanisms and emblems from heroics were a good way to get people up and running to join the elegible raiding populace. It also encouraged more people getting to max level through ease of access to dungeons and arriving there with a more solid grasp of their class mechanics in a group setting. Cross realms helped prevent longer queue times, pad out faction imbalances and low server pops and let people with odd playtimes stay at a low latency server but still find an active grouping pool. All of this is being left behind for some nebulous concept of community that never materialized during either classic iteration and that the new tool in no way encourages or causes.
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What do you mean, we condensed 40 healthy servers with thriving communities into ~5 servers.
Clearly the method of forcing people to form their own dungeons groups worked wonders on our community… KEKW
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They launched waaaay too many servers anyway. It would have been better to launch a total of 10 or so.
They did launch with a bit too much, but classic azeroth wasnt really built for 10-15K player servers… 5-6k was the sweet spot and there were a ton of servers with that exact population. it was amazing.
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people played the game out of nostalgia and then moved on. nothing would have changed that
For sure some of that.
Personally my experience playing on a mega server was better for my character but far worse for my experience.
I got to dungeon and raid and play the game… but everyone was a nameless faceless thing, little community unfortunately.
I went from Myzrael to Pagle after everyone began looking for a bigger raiding scene. I didn’t want to go to Benediction because that didnt seem like it would be a good time on a server full of “look at me streamer!” Folks. Sorry to legit peeps just trying to raid and have a good time over there. 
Isn’t Pagle also slowly dying nowadays?
Just an initial burst with the server unlocks to PvP.
I predict it will die in WOTLK… but PvE servers are far more relaxed and dont concern themselves with running dungeons 24/7
I could see them being resilient and still rolling just fine with 4-5k ppl until the end of the expac. nothing would shock me
There is still a big raiding scene. I think a few big guilds bounced to another realm somewhere and people began panicking. At the time and even now Pagle was double the population.
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A couple of notable guilds moved, but it still has a pretty healthy population. Will it survive? Time will tell, but im hopeful.
Pagle is kicking and doing great !
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RDF doesnt prevent socialisation; I was in a group the other day, where 2 people refused to communicate with the rest of the group.