More on Era Server Populations

On the WoW Classic subreddit it's a bit of a meme that era players can't stop talking about how busy the era servers are and there's certainly some truth to that, but if you're someone who's been following the development of era for a while, it's just been utterly fascinating to see how much the star of this MMO with no active development continues to rise.

When I started playing on era last year, my Battle.net friends seemed to consider that a weird move at best, and nobody had any desire to join me. Yet in the past couple of weeks, two of my old guildies suddenly contacted me after rolling characters on the PvE cluster, and I briefly chatted with two others who'd created characters on Hydraxian Waterlords to try out hardcore mode. Suddenly, era is "in".

I mentioned in January that the EU PvP cluster as well as Hydraxian Waterlords - now unofficially designated "the hardcore server" - had both grown to medium population. In March, they ticked over to high, and just the other day their status changed to "full". I'm actually not sure what that means nowadays - Wowpedia states that "players cannot create a character on a full realm unless they already have characters on that realm", but I'm not sure whether that's true anymore, considering that there's also "locked" (which doesn't apply to any era realms at the moment, but has been used in Wrath). Either way, it's pretty clear that those servers are full to burst, and one has to wonder what that will mean for any potentially upcoming "overspill".

I logged into the hunter I made on Hydraxian when it first hit medium to see how the population growth had affected the experience of playing there, and it was a stark reminder that to me personally, "high" population is not actually appealing at all. Teldrassil was being scoured of mobs as they spawned, and I completed two quests by basically just running back and forth between a couple of spawn spots where mobs re-appeared mere seconds after having been killed. Trying to hand the quest in at the end was a chore as the quest NPC does a little bit of RP every time someone completes a quest with him, and there was a whole huddle of night elves around him just spam-clicking to get in there first. I logged out again shortly after that because the whole experience was just giving me hives.

On the other end of the spectrum, with the PvP cluster being classified as full, I suddenly found myself wondering about the other, abandoned PvP cluster on EU, centred on the Gehennas server. I don't usually play on PvP servers, but what does it matter when there's nobody around to fight you? So I made a human paladin there to have a look around - I was pleasantly surprised that the first three-letter name I entered was not even taken. I actually had a pretty good time questing in Elwynn all by myself - like Redbeard, I find the experience of replaying certain starting zones to be the virtual equivalent of "comfort food".

The census addon didn't see much activity there - never more than 20 people online at a time, which does not make the cluster appealing to a mainstream audience right now, but if Firemaw runs out of room, who knows what the future will bring? Hydraxian Waterlords was deader than this less than a year ago and look where it is now.

The PvE cluster (where I play) is also still classified as having low population, though we've been growing so much, I feel like we should be ticking over to medium any day now. I really want that to happen as well because I feel with how slowly we've been growing compared to PvP and hardcore, people are starting to not take us seriously as a "main" cluster anymore - which is a silly thing to worry about, I know, but being active on the era Discord as I am, it does bother me a little. More importantly though, officially being classified as medium would help to make it clearer to more casual players that we're one of the currently active realms. It may not be apparent on the server selection screen, but there's a big difference between a "low" realm with thousands of players and one with virtually none - even if the last few months have demonstrated that things can change surprisingly quickly on that front.