There probably is a >0 amount of people who are wondering if the server is completely dead in the water or not. Well, I am happy to inform you all, that there is still a pulse.
On the Alliance side, the guild which I am the GM of, and on Discord we have a core of some ~5 active players with tons of alts at various level ranges. The exact number of active players varies depending on how well the other versions of WoW are doing, and right now we are in the middle of something of a dry spell, but despite that, we are still getting things done. We have a very casual and long-term orientated mindset that prioritizes consistency over how many hours a day/week one plays. We do have a sign-up bot for events, which I put weekly events on our Discord, but no one is obligated to sign on those if they don’t feel like it. They are just something for people to do if they want to.
To an outsider, this might make the server seem completely dead, as on /who there doesn’t appear to be any or just a few people online who are not mage bots inside a dungeon, but that is because we mostly organize through Discord.
While people might not be logged in all the time, many of us do read Discord and will log on if we are needed for something, while also having our own various little personal projects going on they slowly work on along the months at their own pace. Many of us have already farmed Naxx for so long, that the raiding has lost its appeal, but we still like the leveling and pre-raid content of the OG classic.
Some examples of our typical activities consist of things like:
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Helping someone get heavy leather for their engineering quest(As the AH has nothing in it), so someone logs their lvl20 hunter that can skin lvl30 mobs that drop heavy leather, but can’t kill them, so the one needing the help will kill the mobs for the hunter to skin. Silly stuff like that to get around the fact that we truly only have each other to rely on here, and we have to make do with what we have.
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Doing 5man dungeons with 3 to 4 people sometimes with a rogue tank(ZT Mythic+). The empty nature of the server makes herbs plentiful, which allows us to go with full consumables and with high-level enchants on our green leveling gear. Few of those high-level enchants that cost like 1-5 dusts can give a level20 more stats from the enchants than the rest of their gear gives them.
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As the BiS meta here is very different from the regular meta due to us not always being able to do UBRS/Scholo/Strat/Dire and such from where some of the best pre-raid gear comes from, this makes some of those “garbage” reputation rewards actually worth doing. Cenarion Circle, Thorium Brotherhood, Timbermaw Hold/Zandalar Tribe reps all offer crafting recipes for lvl60 blue gear that one can farm solo or with a little help from someone.
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Fill out the guildbank with stuff that people might in the future need. Our Guildbank’s contents are on a spreadsheet with some ~300 pieces of BoE gear, over 100 different types of profession mats, and misc generally useful items. I buy all the greens for 2x their vendor value to either add to the list from where people can buy them for vendor price, or to turn to dust and shards to be used for enchants. I also buy Runecloth 3g per stack, which is then used to make Runecloth bags to be given out to new players/people’s alts. Because of this farming gold for your epic mount is not as doomed of an endeavor here as it would otherwise be, and we do have an economy, even if a small one.
Overall the general vibe is less of an MMO and more of a small discord server that has its own RPG world to mess around in. This definitely is not for everyone, but the good thing is that, you only need a very few people to make this work.
Another thing I value greatly is to not make people feel like they are obligated to do anything or that they owe anyone anything.
If someone wants to raid on Firemaw, I welcome people to roll here, level to 60, and then use the free transfer to go to Firemaw. I do not consider it a betrayal or anything, as it is an objective fact that raiding on ZT at this point is impossible, and if someone wants to raid, they cannot do it here. So I don’t hold it against anyone if they do transfer or quit. By trying ZT out one has nothing to lose, as there are absolutely no expectations piled onto anyone, and they can transfer to Firemaw if they realize that the micro-community stuff is not their cup of tea after all.
At the end of the day, this is a video game guild/server, not some blood cult you swear everlasting fealty to. Playing together is its own reward, even if people move on to something else at some point. That’s life, nothing is permanent.
Our Discord code if anyone wishes to ask more: axYU7A3AEk
