I just canceled my subscription because the situation is beyond ridiculous.
It was bad but still playable in the 10s and 20s levels, now my warrior is lvl 32 and I can hardly find a living creature in STV but dozens of other players hunting them, no matter which time of day.
This is pointless. Not only is it unplayable, the situation shows that those responsible for the state of affairs have 1. no clue what theyre doing, 2. no idea whats going on, and 3. no interest of getting a clue.
So far I have resorted to only grind mobs in dungeons but since I had the day off today I decided against better judgement to try and quest on the Anniversary Server. I figured it might actually be doable considering it was during work hours.
I was wrong. What a waste of time.
I’m guess-timating that I spent 90-95% of the gameplay today just standing idle and waiting for spawns in a completely void landscape and competing for tags with the enemyfaction. I noted that between EVERY SINGLE questitem drop the questtracker actually timed out and disappeared due to lack of activity. 
It was not uncommon at all that 20 minutes wen’t by between the looting of two quest-items. This is completely ridiculous. How can the quality be so incredibly bad on official servers?! This is a complete joke!
So good news, it’s still terrible but it’s alot easier to complete quests between 03.00 to 09:00. I can’t try it every day sadly.
I would suggest coming to Era mate - Pop still quite healthy, and it will increase over time as anniversary loses steam.
This is also just a suggestion - If you have made up your mind I fully understand.
I would add a toggle on the logon screen to choose high or low density layer.
Unfortunately this is something where only half the player base was vocal:
Both of these tend to request high population because that’s how those work.
They never say mechanics, they always say it’s nice to have a busy, living world.
Which is fine, but then change everything to GW2. Public tagging, etc.
Silent people enjoying quests are screwed however, and we were never supported.
Go play Skyrim
I’ve played on realms with 1-3 people per zone while levelling back in the day. For me that is the classic levelling experience.
Except I’m dungeoneering in this iteration.
What is this layer thing? Havent played WoW in a very long time.
Within one server, there are multiple instances of the same zone.
Logically the same as phasing. Or instances (dungeons, raids, battlegrounds, arenas).
The first step was splitting the world to additional zones, I first saw it on Nost but also in Classic 2019. Most obvious when people would cross the Stormwind gates, they would (dis)appear. The occasional hiccup would cause you to drop from the taxi at zone borders. Or ships.
The original game was designed for roughly 2k people (spread across factions and zones, dungeons) but recently people were enjoying 10-20k online on a single server, including phase launches. It is simply too populated to quest, even with near-instant respawns, including much boosted herb nodes. There have also been servers of various population, so you could pick something suitable, today there is just one, thus decided for you.
In comparison, GW2 spins up (and down) zones depending on how many players are in each location. It’s pretty obvious there with zone portals and the occasional message nagging to move to another instance. Both there and in WoW, one unhappy cause of that can be big raids passing through (in GW2 you teleport but there are many world bosses).
More importantly, GW2 has public creature tagging, public events and private nodes, and no loot based quests, at least that’s the overwhelming majority of it. So it can support higher population, in fact it’s welcome. Unlike in WoW where people take the mining node while you kill its guardian, and so.
I just logged out, I was excited to play one the weekend, so was everyone else, now no one of us gets to play cause we’re waiting an hour to do a single quest with 10 mob kills. Seriously I’ve logged off twice today cause there is no mobs to kill and I’m just wasting my time running in circles.
I HATE IT!!!. I don’t think I will give this many more tries.
Thanks for the explanation. I guess the point of layering is to split the server (realm?) population into reasonably sized sub-populations? People can be on the same realm and never “see” each other?
I just realized that there are more classic realms other than the anniversary ones. There are the “era” realms (no idea whats the difference), actually a whole lot of them, but they all got “low” populations. So I picked a random PVE realm (by far the majority are PVP) and leveled a char to 10. When I visited the cities I was greeted by utter emptiness. Very little offerings on the auction house. No wonder nobody ever replied to my “LFM” calls in the zone chat.
So the anny servers are overpopulated, the era servers are underpopulated. The problem is obvious: Blizzard needs a technology that either splits or merges servers to get an optimal population, though “optimal” might differ between certain player types.
Sub-pops: Yes.
Era: The term was introduced upon launching BC, instead of calling them Classic Classic. The word would mean they stay in 1.x story, but it also means #NoChanges. Mostly.
PvE: I played a year or two ago and it was lonesome. A couple weeks ago I was told they are healthy but didn’t check myself, maybe the guy was talking about PvP.
Anniversary: It’s effectively Era but there is a basic LFD tool (very welcome) and maybe Dual Spec (might be a miss due to its requirements).
If you can, I would recommend playing in the mornings.
ERA realms are combined in clusters so in essence they are the same thing as Anniversary - all PvE realms are combined together 
I would say for Anniversary it’s a matter or layer count (and also people not going blindly to bottleneck zones/quests). If someone is at the top of the leveling wave it will be hard, but ahead or behind it it’s way more chill.
And as you noticed ERA is very low, lowered by Anniversary even. Anniversary will also drop in a month or two to then drop even more until TBC.
I just installed the Nova addon that can show the layering and what layer Im on. It’s a very fresh update (4.12.2024) but Im not sure it works properly. It either shows no layer or layer 1. Maybe the layering is simply disfunctional right now.
I actually often play at night (CET). You wouldnt believe how crowded the world is even at these hours.
Nova world buffs works.
Yesterday I was on layer 3, the day before on layer 5. The list of layers, and the two possible world buffs (which are not in yet), shows up when you mouse over the minimal icon.
You can also find info on the map, and a little box on the minimap should state your layer.
Firemaw ERA is aboutthe size of Gehennas (biggest PvP EU server) back in 2021. So it is not very low. By all accounts it is a pretty big server.
You also forgot to mention that once the anniversary fresh effect dwindles, Era wil pick up more returning players.
Before the Anniversary was announced I checked my ERA characters and for example, Barrens had half of the traffic it had when Era was at its peak. Your cluster on IronForge has a 4K population which is low for a server. PvE has 1K.
They will move to Classic MoP, War Within, wait for TBC, or whatever new game people will have in mind. Era players are only a fraction of the Anniversary and players move to whatever is “current” even if it’s Cata or MoP.
Era in its current state has the same amount of players or more than the biggest server in the EU (Gehennas) had on the Naxx patch during the Classic re-release. This is a fact.
It is btw not a 4K pop server, it is 4k players who have raided plus all other players who are leveling or do not raid. That is 100 40-man raids last week. If you compare this to 1. OG Vanilla servers, 2. Pservers or 3. Classic re-release servers, it is indeed huge.
Now Anniversary is taking all servers and clustering them into one with layers for the first time. I just checked and the Horde AH numbers in Era are 25% of those of anniversary, so that fraction you are speaking about is in no way minuscule. If Anniversary were split into multiple servers, there is a good chance some would be bigger than Era, and some smaller.
As for moving somewhere else but Era, I have been long enough here to see the population in Era fluctuate from 2 guilds raiding, to hundreds, to what we have now. I do not quite understand why you like to spread lies and actively try and deter people from joining a very active and playable Vanilla server.
In case it is because you couldn’t have fun there, try and not spoil it for the rest who may want to give it a go.
I am really curious where you are getting those numbers. Please share your data source.
You are coping hard. I leveled a hunter where Era was on a wave and even then the experience at best was barely acceptable with skewed level 60 experience. That’s why people wanted FRESH and not Era. Easy solo leveling with all the mobs up - Era, easy 60 with free split-run PUGs - Era - yet people picked fresh that has contested leveling and no freebie-raid gear.
Blizzard limited layer hopping to stabilise each layer in anniversary realms so naturally mages are angry with their AoE layer hopping exp farming is nerfed this way.