what about a dk guild ?
The problem with the Sanâlayn (I am delving into this subject for the first time here!) is that itâs not a race, itâs the name of the sect in the Scourge. The race would be Darkfallen aka Undead elves, albeit with a vampiric touch. What matters is your affiliation. Itâs like saying that Sylvanas is Scourge because she once was a part of it. But sheâs not anymore.
If you are an intelligent Undead, then you are free to choose what to do with your life/undeath next. Pledging loyalty to the Forsaken is a great way to be an official member of the Horde and the largest sentient undead community. Itâs very versatile and canonically includes plenty of undead subtypes from Geists and Banshees to Wraiths, Death Knights and leper gnomes. So yes, DKs can also be part of the Forsaken.
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This genuinely shouldnât be an issue in term of population because whatâs roleplayed isnât an exact one for one for canon. It canât be.
Or are people going to âpoliceâ how mamy people play high elves? I mean, if thatâs the case theyâll likely have to police dark spear, blood and void elves too! Maybe other races. We could talk about how thereâs a finite amount of blood knights too due to the entire insignia malarky, a fraction of a fraction.
The âeurgh thereâs too many xâ has always been a bit of a puerile comment imo. I get that itâs nice to see a bit more variety and quality* can -really- vary when something is popular, but itâs honestly not an issue like some people make it out to be. And i have - historically - found the people to bang on this drum the loudest to just be rather unpleasant.
*subjectivity etc.
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And, as we saw in BfA, some San´layn (who are a specific type of undead, a vampiric one) wanted to join the Horde. They failed, and even were shown to be untrustworthy because they couldn´t keep themselves from sucking blood out of Forsaken (now how does that work mechanically, I don´t know).
Ever since, we´ve seen San´layn to be enemies of the Horde. A San´layn who wants to be friendly with the Horde is such a huge outlier that anyone RPing it reeks of pure snowflakism.
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I miss the days of when âundeadâ (See: Not Forsaken) characters all fell under the Scourge label and did their cool stuff in the nooks and corners of the world, bringing RP to less populated zones instead of trying to do slice-of-life/nightclub RP in Stormwind/Ogrimmar (Sanâlayn)
Ebon Blade guilds are different though. Granted, back then most of them had the decency to avoid Stormwind in general, or were fully onboard when people reacted negatively to them prancing about.
(We donât talk about the flood of lvl 58 blood elf DKâs in Silvermoon. That era is best forgotten.)
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Each one with 2x Phantom blade and mongoose enchant on both. 
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âThereâs too many of people playing x unique thingâ - Person who is also playing a unique thing, assuming theyâre not playing as bob from westfall or grog from razor hill.
Like yeah, RP isnât representative of the actual population of the world⌠because most of the population of the world isnât exactly the most fun to RP. Always found it such a weird thing to get up in arms about when weâre almost all playing characters who are a fraction of a fraction of the population.
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Its also kind of ridiculous anyways due to the fact that during the Second War Turalyon is said to have left Silvermoon âat the head of an Elven armadaâ's worth of Elves marching with him all the way to the Blasted Lands to go through the portal with him and Alleria. plus the High Elves from the Lodges, Stormwind, the ones who went to Kalimdor etc., thereâs more than enough High Elves left despite the whole 5% of 10% population meme people love to fling around.
You could honestly make the argument RPers donât represent enough of the High Elf population before you make the argument that they over-represent it.
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Special snowflaking, huh? Then tell me, mr. Smart Lawful Good Knight of Light, are there many ways to incorporate an undead character into the playable faction? Blizzard have added so much random stuff recently without bothering to provide comprehensive guidelines for it (yes, undead Kalâdorei, Iâm looking at you, not to mention Darkfallen Void Elves, bruh) that we inevitably have to make something up ourselves.
Of course, no matter the origin, the undead are untrustworthy mysterious characters. They are defined by their tragic fate, sinister clandestine goals and predisposition to dark habits. This is the specific type of character, then why is a human librarian or a troll voodoo master plausible and an undead suddenly not?
Then the gnome dude will appear and tell me that itâs strictly IC!! But here Iâve seen many people who call undead players âsnowflakes, edgy kids, etc.â Just accept the fact that some people love this race and play it
Even if thereâs a few thousand Quelâdorei players at most on the server thatâs still likely less than the official population, unless silvermoon was absolutely tiny before arthas had his gamer moment.
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Which is unlikely because, despite the fact Elves are slower to birth, they still live for several thousand years at least, so you probably had your great-great-great grandparents hanging around with you in Silvermoon still by the time of the 3rd War.
Only reason I wasnât part of these people was because I was 12 and didnât know WOTLK had released while hiding in my permanent isolation within Mulgore . Thank God for childhood obliviousness. 
(I became a level 58 DK in Cata though, because it was destiny.)
That ainât it, chief.
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Just a friendly reminder that I mentioned this argument in response to people claiming that they want to play the game only according to the lore and obey the very strict set of rules. To this I commented that they donât seem to be bothered by the population factor, which, as you all rightfully stated, cannot be controlled and doesnât distract you from RP.
This statement was in defense of the playersâ choice of what to play and what story theyâd like to create. Not the other way round.
The issue here, is that youâre arguing from a broken perspective that is not comparable. Itâs the argument itself, that you defaulted to (and still bring up) that just⌠Isnât an argument to begin it.
An OOC variable, the amount of players that choose to play as a quelâdorei, a mechanical topic, is not the same as outright badRP/lore-breaking/whatever you want to label it.
The RPâer is not responsible for what others choose to play as in-game. The RPâer is responsible if they choose to âRPâ a Sanâlayn bouncer/biker for a night club in Orgrimmar.
And then to fall onto petty insults, hissyfits and just flinging 
like a monkey across the thread doesnât help your already faulty standpoint.
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I sort of half-disagree because I do think it can cause an issue when f.ex the main human city is bizarrely full of anything-but-humans but itâs not really an issue that can be solved. Who are you gonna tell âsorry, the draenei quota for today is metâ or âhey pal elf guild could you all log off to preserve the human-to-others ratio?â
Itâs a problem but one that is impossible to fix and thus not really worth fixating on.
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at the end of the day some forms of headcanon are fine, but its best to stick with using it to fill unexplained gaps in the lore itself, it becomes an issue when you start using headcannon to replace actual hard refferable lore.
To use an extremely exagerated example:
We all agree that the water in the game behaves very much like water that we know it.
So we host a pool party, thereâs people in the water rping and mingling and socializing, but here comes a dude whose headcanon is that water in the game is actually a lot more like lava
now these two parties start interacting with eachother, pool party group claims that theyâre fine, the water is cozy and nice.
Lavaman insists that actually the water is lava and they should all be dead now and does not want to sway from his opinion, maybe even whispering people about how theyâre breaking the water is lava headcannon lore like its a real thing.
You can prove that the water does behave like our water because; boats float in it, fish swim in it, people drink it, etc. But lavaman refuses to accept that the water is anything but lava and blames the party that accept that water is water. After some back and forth Lavaman decides to not change his opinion and ends up on the ignore list of team pool party, not because heâs evil or wrong, but because their headcannon is so wildly beyond their own that trying to engage with lavaman will only ever be disruptive.
tl;r donât be lavaman
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Them gosh-DARN non-humies took our jerbs in our HUMAN city
Damn. The Primalists struck harder than anything did during SL.
Iâm honestly not sure what youâre arguing against/for anymore.
Kaldorei*.
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You answered your own line of thinking here. There are no Sanâlayn affiliated with the Forsaken and thus there are no Sanâlayn aligned with the Horde.
As long as you recognise the world at large will either have severe trust issues or hate your very being - that including the Forsaken, they do not like Scourge either.
You donât simply pledge your loyalty to something, and even if you did, itâs not an automatic license giving you free reign of all Horde land. The Sanâlayn in BfA were given a long list of things they had to do in order to be allowed to join the Forsaken; they failed. With Sylvanas gone, itâs unlikely the Desolate Council would extend the same olive branch - even Sylvanas only did it because she had use for the Sanâlayn, and they in turn did not have any motives that werenât overwhelmingly selfish.
And the Rotgarde accepts them all.
Nasty old blood that coagulated years ago.
Literally all playable races with the exception of like highmountain tauren, goblins (a bit questionable), pandaren and Kul Tirans. Almost all playable races have suffered some calamity that either laid their people low and either flat out destroyed or nearly destroyed their nations.
Stormwind was destroyed during the First War, the most of the survivors fled to Lordaeron or hid beneath the Cathedral. Many of the survivors who fled north opted to remain in Lordaeron after the Second War. They lost twenty thousand men in Icecrown during WotLk.
The Bronzebeards suffered massive losses during the Second War with the Bleeding Hollow ravaging all of Khaz Modan while the dwarves were forced to hide in Ironforge.
The gnomes likewise had to hide in Gnomeregan from the orcs and would later on have to evacuate their city due to Thermapluggâs radioactive treason - their population is on par with the Darkspears, but not as few as the high elves.
The night elves suffered massive losses during the Third War and during BfA Teldrassil was burnt, taking much of their people with it. Somehow.
The draenei are the few remaining survivors who fled Outland after the Rise of the Horde which destroyed their entire civilisation.
Gilneas was ravaged by civil war, the Scourge hammering at their gate, the worgen curse itself and later on the Forsaken invasion. Their kingdom is plagued and the survivors spread out across Teldrassil and other Alliance territories.
The Tushui are doing good, though. Their âlandâ is still there on the back of a huge turtle.
The orcs brought themselves to ruin in Outland after the rise of the Old Horde, then they fought two massive wars back to back - losing the second. The survivors either fled to Outland where they would become the Fel Horde eventually, were captured by the Alliance and imprisoned, or hid in the wilds. The entire Horde after Thrall became Warchief was so few in numbers they could sail to Kalimdor on ships stolen from Southshore. The Dark Horde hasnât fared any better and neither did the Dragonmaw, the orcsâ only saving grace is them having lots of children who reach maturity within 13 years if we go by older lore.
The Forsaken, along with being a whole cadre of non-human undead, were originally a fraction of Lordaeronâs pre-war population risen into undeath who managed to have their free will restored. For years their only way of ârecruitingâ was to take a plague infected corpse and wait with the hopes whomever it was rose with their will intact. With the coming of the Valâkyr, who are now gone again, the OG Forsaken are probably outnumbered by those who have been risen since. They lost the Undercity, many remained loyalists.
The tauren are a bit more trickier since only the Bloodhoof Tribe was close to being hunted to extinction by the centaur, but that is the tribe our playable tauren characters belong to. So while the race is fine, the tribe was close to extinction only 20 years ago.
The Darkspears are so few in numbers they managed to fit onto the ships already carrying Thrallâs Horde across the seas, ships they stole from one human town. Their numbers are comparable to gnomes, which is simply ânot as few as the high elvesâ. And that was before Zalazane betrayed them.
Blood elves, we all know their story. 90% died, toobz.
The goblins are a bit more difficult, the race is fine, but the Bilgewater Cartel? All of their holdings seem to have been on Kezan before they joined the Horde, Kezan burnt and we donât know of too many ships that fled. Least of all Bilgewater ships. But like orcs they breed quickly.
The Huojin are doing good, though. Their âlandâ is still there on the back of a huge turtle.
The void elves can only number in the hundreds (if even that) unless you want to claim thousands of blood elves were exiled for studying the void, and Darâkhanâs teachings.
The Lightforged battled the Legion for thousands of years without any means of reinforcing themselves. By the time we encounter them in Legion they are on the brink of defeat.
The Dark Iron has fought a civil war ever since Cata with so much of the clan turning against Moira and Dagran II that Shadowforge City was firmly in their hands, itâs probably still ongoing in some fashion since the Cult of Ragnaros is still a thing.
Kul Tirans are mostly fine, but their lands were ravaged by internal strife and their navy demolished.
Mechagnomes, another hard fought civil war. They are probably more well off than most of the races in a similar situation.
Nightborne, another civil war amidst a Legion invasion that held their city in an iron grip. Lots of them were loyalists, many became Felborne.
With the playable Magâhar being of the AU variety, theyâre the handful who managed to flee before the Lightbound slaughtered them all.
Zandalari, mostly fine. Lots of death and destruction during the war, including almost their entire navy.
Vulpera were for years oppressed and enslaved by the Faithless, they live in a harsh desert with few resources. Neither is gonna do wonders for a large population. But they are better off than most.
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Again, how can you be a Sanâlayn and a Forsaken at the same time? These are not races, they are names of separate clans or whatever. When people keep bringing Sanâlayn up they get too fixated on the name and miss the point
No, they do not.