I’ve been playing a lot of Classic lately, and one thing that makes it far better than Retail is the open-world interaction with other players.
Today, I spent three hours in Retail and didn’t encounter a single person. Meanwhile, in Classic, I met over 15 players in less than 10 minutes.
Whether it’s due to phasing, layering, or something else, it needs to be removed. Retail often feels more like a single-player game, which takes away from the MMO experience.
Classic also has phasing/layering. Retail has people in the open world, theyre just flying over you at mach 7.
Spent three hours where? The world is much bigger than it is in classic, there are dead zones, this is why the game funnels people to certain expansions. Play DF and TWW and you’re much more likely to meet people.
Classic has 2 continent.
Retail have more.
So thread seems bait.
Phasing, layering, sharding or whatever the term is, is probably the issue, as ive got a really dead home shard thing for one of my characters where its me and like 2 other people in whole of Dornogal, while several other chars its super crowded everywhere. Personally i prefere less people around, but it is very strange that some characters are given a home layer that is permamently deserted, while some get into the crowded ones. The issue i have with my main is that no matter if its crowded or not, it will automaticly throw me around all the time into different layers and it is very annoying, as you never know if it will do its thing so if you are trying to kill something it might vanish in front of you, and you can’t keep track of timers if you example trying to wait for an hour respawn of a rare monster. I like layering or which ever term it is, however it should be done a lot better, as it feels very unstable and random.
If you do a \who in all the zone that are not TWW , you will find nearly no people
But im talking about the TWW zones.
It’s never going to happen.
You’d have to undo something like 17 years of game design.
If you prioritize spontaneous social interactions out in the game world then I’d recommend just sticking to one of the pre-cata versions.
I only see people in the main city.
Back when there were bots, at least you saw people running on ground mount like a robot. 
Now every zone is just dead
#doubt.
Old zones hold no value in retail, thats why they are like ghostlands.
If you walk/run around in lets say Isle of Dorn, you will meet nearly no one
Were you sitting in the middle of a zone in Vanilla or the older expansions?
Because I see plenty of players around while leveling or questing in more recent previous expansions like SL and DF.
And plenty more in TWW, especially with WM ON.
Come on… logically you’d have to realise across 10 expansions and base WoW the playerbase is going to be thinned out across them, vs Classic.
Did you just make an replay without reading all the answers Have answered everything you just said
I think classic is dead. I just went to felwood in cata classic and it was completely empty.
The “/who” function has been broken ever since connected realms became a thing more than a decade ago…
You can literally do a /who to see just yourself listed and have 20 people around you… nevermind it not showing the opposite faction.
not in classic freash or sod? ofc ERA is dead
oh here we go again…
do you not get bored with repeating yourself
For the 100000000th time, no thank you.
Just keep playing Classic 
Made a new character on sod and saw 2 people questing.
Went to the Hallowfall weekly/daily torch place and saw like 30 people questing.
I think classic is dead
I also had the feeling yesterday while sitting in dornogal that there are not as many people in the city as I would like to expect. And that was in quite prime time around 7PM and with accounting other servers in same cluster not just my home server. And that begs the question are people still actively playing or is it really so dead at the end of the season? M+ groups were available constantly though and list was large even for low keys, and queues for something like love event dungeon were also not longer than 3-5 min usually