Reading the Cataclysmic Tea Leaves

Okay, that little thing about curiosity... Well, at least I'm not a cat.*

I was curious about whether people would abandon Blizzard's official WoW Classic servers when Cataclysm Classic comes out, and that led to an even more basic question: are there any Cataclysm private servers out there?

Uh... I have no idea.

In the interest of answering that question, I decided to turn to search engines to find out the answer.

That led me to dkpminus.com**, which actually has listings of private servers from all sorts of expansions from World of Warcraft.

Yes, even Shadowlands.

The homepage as of 16-Nov-2023.

The site claims that they keep it up to date, but obviously someone who spins up their own private server for themselves and their friends won't likely be represented here. Still, it does give you some idea as to what might be going on in the private server community.

What I'm going to do is provide a quick chart as to the numbers of WoW servers per expansion. Obviously I'm reliant upon what dkpminus.com provides, and not all private servers are alike in terms of faithfulness to the original content, but hey, it'll give you an idea as to where the popularity resides.

Okay, here's the WoW private servers per expansion as of November 16, 2023:

You'll probably want to click on the graphic to expand it.

The "Promoted" servers don't show numbers on the lists, so I've kept them separate. Also, some sites have multiple servers and are counted individually. For example, among the several Warmane servers there's Warmane - Lordaeron (PvP - Blizzlike) and Warmane - Blackrock (PvP - Custom Style) in the Wrath listings, so each Warmane server is counted separately.

If you click on a server name, you get more details:

Warmane - Icecrown is the most populated
server in the Wrath listings.

...and the Classic Plus server that people
tend to mention the most, Turtle WoW.

***

I was actually surprised that there was a single Warlords of Draenor server out there, although it's very sparsely populated.***

But one thing I also found interesting were the people who frequent that (relatively) large RP-PvE Shadowlands server. I guess Shadowlands has its fans after all, albeit from the RP community.

A lot of the private servers are PvP oriented, so if you're not into that... Oh well.

While perusing the comments section, I see that the private servers are very much a "play at your own risk" environment. There are numerous complaints of misbehavior and bots throughout, and on some listings the occasional positive comment can feel like it was planted there by that server's team. 

So...

My question as to whether there even are Cataclysm private servers has been answered. The Wrath private servers are by far the largest contingent, but Cataclysm is represented.

*Hey Wilhelm, did you know that if you put "you know what they say about curiosity telestra" into Google search, that one of your graphics is the third one that appears in the "Images" tab?

**As in "THAT'S A FUCKING 50 DKP MINUS!!!!" from the infamous Onyxia Wipe Animation video from back in the day, detailing a raid leader's meltdown on an Onyxia wipe. The original was removed by YouTube for graphic or violent content, so I found the original here on Rumble.

***I guess those people are hanging out in their garrisons.