Heyy,
No offense, but…
Whichever Vanilla Classic Era server I try to play on I literally never see any players, maybe just a handful of them in a capital city.
It’s super lonely and I don’t know what to do 
What is everyone else doing?
Season of discovery seems slightly more populated but not sure if I enjoy it too much.
There are pretty much three options to play Classic Era (“Vanilla”)
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Join the Firemaw PvP cluster. This is the most populated realm, but also bot infested and filled with GDKP and boost runs.
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Join the Pyrewood Village PvE cluster. No GDKP here, and AH pricers are closer to Earth. However, not as populated as Firemaw - especially on Horde side.
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Join Zandalari Tribe. An abandoned RP server, where people are now rerolling to have the Era feeling on a semi-fresh realm. If things doesn’t turn out well there, you have a free server transfer to Firemaw, so everything isn’t lost if server dies.
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Thank you very much for the recommendation, I’ll try all of those and see if it’s more fun.
It would be nice if Blizzard did some mass transfers to combine multiple dead servers into an active one.
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They kind of did that with the Pyrewood and Firemaw clusters: they are a collection of several servers acting as one big.
That way they made one PvE cluster and two PvP clusters. The other PvP cluster is dead and tbh they should just merge the remaining PvP servers into the Firemaw one.
The last servers are country-specific servers and RP servers, such as Celebras and Zandalari, which they can’t really merge together with the “main servers” without making alot of people angry.
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So there is a little bit of hope at least 
I checked how busy the servers you mentioned are between lvl 1 to 10. It seems Firemaw is really the best choice.
Firemaw
Alliance 50+ but probably twice as many
Horde 50+
Pyrewood Village
Alliance 46
Horde 15
Zandalar Tribe
Alliance 10
Horde 13
Go to the hardcore realms, my boy. Lots of people there.
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Tried it, but it sucks so much when your character dies.
I would’ve probably loved this as a kid, but now as an adult seeing these few free daily hours go to waste feels a bit depressing
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it can indeed be painful
You can move dead HC character to Era server - free even, so not all lost.
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can’t recommend pyrewood. spying pyrewood discord for 2 weeks and it’s worse as expected. Leveling dungeons are pretty much dead. Worldbuffs are a chore to get (at least they aren’t selling nef/hoh pop tho). Barely any guilds exist who can full clear naxx each week many slacking around in MC/BWL. Meanwhile on firemaw many guilds do full clear naxx each week + pretty much every gdkp. If you don’t care about the fact that you probably never be full BIS on pyrewood ´then it might be an option. but don’t expect to find any leveling dungeons.
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About nax is hilarious. Are you going to create new character and immediately go to farm Kel in nax? In time more guilds will be able to fill clear.
About dungeons. Did you try to search people in chat or ask people in guild if they want, or you just looked in chat, saw that people don’t spam lfd permanently and decided that it is dead?
Gdkp is also positive?
„Worldbuffs are chore to get“ (pyrewood has calendar with wb constantly dropping).
„Never be full bus in Pyrewood“. I thought games are about to have fun and great time, not just gearing up
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Yea, to be fair vanilla never was about being full BiS, very few people ever were. The “I need to be full bis gogogo” mentality is what created Retail and the fomo throughout those SoD phases.
Era servers are going on 5 years old so obviously many characters are decked out now, still I agree with you that if starting/joining vanilla with a fresh character the game is, was and never was about “Full BiS”.
Play on firemaw OP, it’s the only real option. PvE servers are not the full/proper game as intended.
I agree with that. If no boosters and gdkp I would have played firemaw like it was when people started returning to classic era and firemaw piped from low to medium.
I feel like not being able to pvp openly in world makes content and experience not full. I liked leveling on firemaw also because of those random pvps all around
Ehm, dont judge Pyrewood by the discord. No one uses that except maybe the owner and his friends. Just like you shouldn’t judge Firemaw by their “official” discord and attached drama.
Nice argmument for fresh servers, but unfortunately for you pyrewood is 5years old
that’s yours to decide i do gdkp but can raid perfectly fine without it.
well i want to become Bis gearing up is fun for me.
the pvp section of the server pretty much sums up wpvp between horde and alliance haha.
You do know why realm types are Normal /PvP do you?
Every class has strengths and weaknesses. Tell me, what is a hunters weakness on a “normal” realm? It is literally playing a watered down game because the mob’s are never going to remotely threaten a hunter. Its a baby game. Hardcore became a meme with the amount of hunters waiting around at endgame. When a human being is fighting a hunter they know it’s about closing and/or nulifying their range. So, again…it’s half a game, maybe even less so when the mobs cant “fight back”. Must be so rewarding sat there hours on end watching pretty colours and shapes with literally 0 threat, there’s little to no challenge whatsoever.
You’re being pedantic with the term, they’ve called it “normal” for the same reason they have to put warnings not to drink on bottles of bleach. WoW was originally intended to release with just PvP servers, they felt like not loosing items or exp at the time made it “soft” enough. Well, apparently not…
The MMORPG’s before WoW were way harsher with punishments on death.
You made 7 mistakes in word „Warlock“
It is actually the other way. WoW was destined release ONLY as PvE. This why PvP & NORMAL.
No it wasn’t, many of the developers were UO and/or everquest gamers at the time. The PvP in both those games were way harsher and so they wanted to tone it down just enough where people weren’t hampered.
Look at the population difference between PvP and PvE clusters. Remember this game’s goal is to generate profit after all. Its the training wheels version and not the full experience (especially hunter). PvP generates more profit.
It’s just not the full experience, look I understand no one likes getting ganked but that doesn’t change the fact that its the full experience. Running around on the PvE realm at T3 60 must feel like those generic ubisoft open world games once you’ve unlocked all the abilities and special costumes, literally zero danger…in an entire world.