As far as I remember, many PVP player used ZT as a workaround realm because the other PVP realms were too crowded, to avoid to have wait for hours to login.
many players never wanted to RP.
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Rumors have it, that following some of the Blizzard scandals and the Portal Pass mount, and their lack of action against bots… amongst various other reasons… People quit and some joined a Private server to continue to RP.
I highly doubt serious RPers would go to Firemaw to RP, but that’s just my opinion.
I know personally some that transferred to Firemaw, but the main reason was not to RP, but instead to get their hands on gems and other materials that were no longer available on ZT… But good news they are available now 
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True,
was even more so for the PvE scene with only 3 English realms 
and many also went to ZT because of youtubers and streamers who then left, leaving lots of non-active characters behind.
I aklso transferred (paid, but luckily with discount) back to HW after having left with my guild.
Many simply panicked when the free transfer opened, and left head over heels. I asked my Guild why they left, and got something like “it seemed the sensible thing to do now free transfer opened” - no real reason, no “We could not do this and that”, only a vague Torschlusspanik.
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Stop saying there are 2 guilds haha… We are more than you think, at least on ZT.
I guess you are looking at numbers from a random spreadsheet you found. Try to login near 18:00 when we are back from work and count the guilds by yourself?
Also, loads of people get easily frightened by the “they put free transfers so they must be a reason”. Then, those same people who transferred will come back to tell us “uuuh this is dead server, come with me on this one instead”. (I mean, why coming back just to say this?) They will simply spread the word that “this is a dead server” to scare people off and unfortunaetly they will always be someone to believe them. They just use the fact that players don’t want to miss out something and will follow blindly a wave.
I truly believe most of the players who left did it out of fear it will become a dead server.
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I hope it’s not the prepatch date, I want to play a bit of TBC before moving on to WotLK
This could very well be the case.
I think it was similar what happend on Celebras 
Sometimes, humans react strange.
I rember Lucifron in the beginning, the biggest and most populated (overcrowded) German PVP - Realm. People tried to login in the morning, so that they could join in the evening after 12 hours. With Teamviewer and so on to contantly keep “busy” to not be disconnected
Reason was: “I do not want to play on an empty realm! i stay here!”
Well… looks at the realm list above
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ZT: Rigth now 2 am 7 guilds represented (Hordeside) and more without any guild
HW: More people, but fewer guilds - actually only 2 hordeside 
and 5 allyside
Celebras: By far the most populated now. 16 Ally guilds and 7 Hordeside -
2 Guilds - go home
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Well I just logged on in this realm and I see exactly 25 players total, and 7 of them are level 70 on horde.
Some people work during the day…
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For someone not playing on RP/RP-pvp servers it can be hard to understand what the “deal” is, but for many people the RP/RP-pvp tag is important. We all play games for different reasons, and servers tagged for roleplay typically attract people who care about the narrative immersion of games. For other players it may be primarily the mechanical immersion that drives them (i.e. the gameplay itself).
Servers have been somewhat of a double-edged sword for MMORPGs. It is within servers that communities thrived, but servers have also always been limiting. Each server has its own climate and this climate does look different on a server tagged for RP than on normal servers – even if you see no apparent roleplaying around. Many people who play on RP servers may not even like the aspect of roleplaying itself, but still seek the narrative immersion. Rivenhorn explained it aptly:
Personally I’ve been in the inactive RP camp for most of my time playing MMORPGs. I am not averse to roleplaying, I will participate every now and then, but my hours spent roleplaying is a small number in the total amount of time I’ve put into playing MMORPGs as a whole. Even so, I develop my characters as I play and I have had many conversations with other people about our characters; what position they would take in certain events, why they dress the way they do, what motivates them etc. (I like to call this “passive roleplay”!)
You may find people who care about these things on a normal server, but you have a much greater chance of finding them on a server tagged for RP.
The decline on Zandalar Tribe was real, but it was not particularly steep. Midway through phase 2 the activity was lower than it had been the first two months of the expansion (which should have been expected…?), but both alliance and horde had active raiding scenes. When people began crying that the server was dead, you could still find people hanging around in the usual zones.
The real killer, in my view, was that content became outdated. After T4 you had zero reasons to run heroic dungeons, aside from maybe money and helping friends out. This made it very hard to find groups for heroics for those who were levelling alts, and this fuelled the perception that the server was dead. “Look at that FULL server! It is super easy to find a group there! Ergo, this server is dead!” and so the narrative was created and it spread like a wildfire through word of mouth.
It may be a moot point to discuss this now, but Zandalar Tribe was not dead, and I don’t feel as though Blizzard really explored any options to try and maintain the server. Killing it off by opening transfers from it was perhaps the easy solution, but the long-term consequence is that we won’t be having RP servers at all in Classic. Which is such a defeat for the players who actually cared about the tag.
Now our options are: join a massive server or a “dead” one. And take a moment to consider the climate on the massive servers, and consider what it means that people would rather go and play on dead servers. Zandalar Tribe could have been a medium-sized server, but fearmongering and hyperbole killed it. Soon the massive servers will be our only choice.
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I was positively surprised to find that many guilds represented in my lunch break sneak peek
I’m mostly what you call a passive RPer as well. I think Malou describes my reasons for playing on a RP server perfectly here:
They killed off all the RP servers with the free transfer - people listened to “Dead server!” and panicked.
Which “dead” servers do we have to choose from when forced to leave the RP servers? - Sorry I see now you meant we had this choice, past tense, not that we will have this choice come August 10.
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Keep LFD, Dual spec, Race and Faction changes in Wrath Classic
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Give 2 Era servers for TBCC
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Let the RP servers survive.
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Sometimes I wish Celebras would have been there from the start and treated like this.
While the clima may be different maybe then it would have been more RPler there.
Additionally this would have been authentic experience too as back then in Classic the two RP Server where treated like this.
And more important we RPler could have played and have fun from the start.
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TLDR:
With the closure of Celebras, a server community that could only thrive in this particular ecosystem will be buried.
This will destroy something that cannot be reconstructed on any “normal” server.
A win in the “logical” sense. More options, better group search etc.
A bitter loss in an “emotional” sense.
As a resident of the first hours of Celebras on 10/25/19 I can hardly express my horror.
I originally started on Everlook but it didn’t really feel like WOW Classic, it was all very impersonal, cold and kind of emotionally empty. There were free transfers to Celebras back when it opened. At that time I never expected to have such a great experience on this server, which I have been able to experience there in the last few years. It was like night and day difference to Everlook. Players who represented virtues, which for me, really made up my personal WOW experience.
Social Interaction and Bonding.
No matter what got in the way of the Cele community in the last 2.5 years, we solved it together. It was always quiet and contemplative but that was also the great advantage of this server. You knew each other. There was a certain etiquette that was maintained because everyone knew everyone else and everyone looked out for each other and ricochets and troublemakers very quickly had no more points of attack.
These were times of honor, duty, helpfulness and solidarity. These bygone characteristics of an MMORPG were exactly what I was looking for when I started playing Classic WOW again and I reckon 95% of the players on Celebras felt the same way. You had to fight and invest for your successes, sometimes cut back and make compromises (even if they were uncomfortable at times).
We raided successfully when everyone said Celebras was dead, we smashed the AQ Gong together and crowned Scarab Lords and crossed factions. We organized a great BC opening event and there were tons of events, videos, theatrical performances, dance competitions, summer and winter games, Olympics, snowball fights, RP taverns, etc. Celebras was a secret meeting place and mid to late Classic had a golden era of creativity and players willing to invest. The AH was empty? No problem, we found other ways to feed each other. There was always someone who knew someone or we just merged with no expectation of anything in return.
There was always life on this server, even if you didn’t notice it directly from the outside. There were so many great and creative people I met who implemented projects and works that were so artistic that I couldn’t speak. All this in the protection of this small server and this very special community. A kind of subculture in the big mishmash rush server structure that WOW Classic had become in the meantime.
The population as such was never really high, but constant. It was our own little RP server ecosystem, it really felt like a trip back in time to the good old WOW days-
The big bang came with the free transfers away from Celebras.
Last minute panic was deliberately stirred up here. "It’s better to go now as long as it’s free before they are turned off again and you have to pay. It’s too exhausting to raid on Celebras anyway, to find groups and in general. There’s no RP either. You can’t just consume without investing! Everything is much better on the other servers - more fluctuation, more choice, more, more, better and above all easier, faster to reach and you can simply take everything with you -
The players who didn’t leave then have moved even closer together.
We networked and supported each other even better. We stayed conscious.
I read here so often, you can just continue on another server.
But it’s not that easy for many. You’ll lose your “ingame” identity as a result - most will have to rename themselves, a forced loss.
Many guilds that took advantage of the free transfer back then no longer exist. Why? Because they left the environment in which they grew. Because under those very circumstances, here on Celebras, you became who you were. This was no longer available on the new servers. And so will many if they are forced to leave the server now.
This is the official death knell and it makes me very sad.
Some associations, guilds and communities will certainly remain and continue to do their thing on the new servers. But the Celebras individual experience will never come again.
Of course there will also be new advantages, more players, easier group search, better stocked auction house etc.
Let’s just hope that Blizz thinks about this again. But the odds are slim. Too bad. I will miss you Celebras with all my heart.
LG Tahro - a currently very sad tauren druid
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I think there’s a big disconnect psychologically between PvE and PvP players. From what I’ve seen looking at population lists most PvE players roll Alliance and most PvP players roll Horde. I’m on Horde Pyrewood EU PvE and where ever you go you’re surrounded by Alliance players and very little Horde. Do we need separate servers for PvE and PvP? Surely people who want to play on PvP servers can pretty much get the same experience by simply turning PvP on? (that’s the only difference between servers right? PvP can’t be turned off?) There will just be added people running around who they can’t attack in PvP zones. I just feel bringing the mostly Horde PvP servers and mostly alliance PvE servers together would help alleviate these balance issues. People still PvP on PvE servers and people still raid on PvP servers right? I don’t know how beneficial having separate servers is in comparison to the issue of server balance.
There’s more to PvP and PvE than just ganking the other faction. Notice the names, notice the way people speak to one another and a whole load of other things. There’s a reason - besides ganking - that I do not even for one second consider moving from HW to one of the monofaction PvP realms. So no. Not a great idea at all!.
i think that was rethoric/sarcastic regarding “why don’t you just play on PVE/PVP servers”…
post edited
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I’m afraid not. Let’s hope
himself answers to this.
These merge all kinds of servers-suggestions regularly pop up in any Forum.
Oh my goodness 
I would never have thought that something like this could be serious
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