I’m returning to WoW after a years long hiatus (the hardcore videos pulled me in, although I have no desire to actually play hardcore). I just finished leveling an Orc Warlock to 60 on Whitemane (Era) and had an absolute blast. There were players, pvp, and things to do all over the place.
I decide to do the same thing on WotLK classic and so far am having the complete opposite experience. I log into my 74 horde pally on Angerforge and the server appears completely dead (3 items on the AH). Did my server just die and I just need a transfer to an active server? Are there active WotLK servers out there bustling with players and things to do like in Classic Era?
Angerforge has free transfers available to Eranikus, Sulfuras, and Whitemane
Eranikus and Sulfuras have free transfers to Benediction and Faerlina (so requires two hops.)
https://ironforge.pro/population/classic/?locale=US
Ironforge pro has population counts to help you make a decision on where you want to move to. Ironforge gets its population counts based on warcraft logs and rated pvp. Populations can be skewed because it counts characters, not unique accounts.
If you are horde, your two options are really Faerlina and Whitemane. Faerlina is East coast server, and Whitemane is a West coast server (if ping is important to you).
Faerlina has about 31k active weekly raiders. Whitemane has about 20k active weekly raiders. (Again, characters, not unique accounts).
I play on pagle which has 16k, and I think its plenty lively. So the 30k Faerlina may be TOO populated. You should be able to make a level 1 on each server and walk around the main city and get a feel for the place. Also check the auction house for raiding staples to get a feel for the economy.
This information is extrememly helpful, much appreciated. I have a followup now… it seems the population has segemented itself into Horde or Alliance exclusive servers??? How did this happen?
With battlegroups I assume this ultimately doesn’t matter (For BGs and Arenas)? Does this mean world PvP is non-existant?
It happened in Phase 2 of Vanilla Classic. It turns out people didn’t really want to play on PVP servers
As for world pvp, you’d have to ask Grobbulus players, as that’s really the only mixed faction pvp server. But there are no free transfers there currently.
Just over time. If you found yourself on a 60/40 server, that means for every 2 of one faction, you have 3 of another faction. That’s 50% more players against you if you are the underdog. So you transfer to a 60/40 server in your favor.
Slowly that turns into 65/35 and applies even more pressure until eventually you get to 99/1
Are the wotlk servers split into multiple battlegroups for arenas and BGs? Or is it one giant battlegroup? I see the west coast servers are heavily populated on the horde side - does this mean horde queues will be longer?
Its all one battlegroup. Battlegrounds, arena, and soon to be Random Dungeon Finder will work across all servers.
Battlegrounds also have Faction vs Faction turned on. So if you are sitting in queue too long, the match maker will put together two teams of the same faction.
I play alliance and I don’t PVP in MMOs. So hopefully a horde player can chime in on what queue times are like.
I agree with Euphorazine’s general point, but I think someone can go deeper than the top 2 if you were picking a server fresh.
Mankrik (13.8k ironforge pop) is still going to be plenty viable for horde US, and even Ashkandi (4.3k) may well be fine, though you’d want to pop in and check it out on a lowbie alt before committing.
Anything below that is at least something of a gamble. Windseeker (1.8k) may hold out through phase 4 as viable if you find a decent guild. Old Blanchy (1.2k horde) I wouldn’t gamble on personally, having spent quite a bit of time there and on similar size servers throughout classic. It’s doable in theory, but just a little too small in practice and subject to falling apart quickly if people start quitting or xfer out to bigger servers.
It’s not only because the majority of the players think wpvp is a waste of time. It’s also because login queues, and alleged server stress. You will get noticeable login queues at the start of a major phase on a realm with 50k alliance 50k horde, and you will get the same level of login queues on a realm with 100k horde, or a realm with 100k alliance. The difference is, if you choose the 50/50 server (pretty much grobbulus), then you have access to 50k for pugging etc instead of 100k. That’s why people flock to megaservers. They think they’re safer with the 100k. Too many players know what it feels like to be a refugee from that dead servers with 3 items on the AH. Blizzard’s mismanagement of populations is chronic and continuous, possibly intentional. Your dead server is from the 3rd or 4th wave of dead servers.
Servers in general are pretty stupid. At least in retail, you can group cross realm, they have “communities” now, which as far as I can tell, are just cross realm guilds. The auction house is region wide.
