It was clear that this situation would change for many guilds with the Start of Phase 6 will intensify. Naxxramas is harder and much more time- and farm-intensive than all previous challenges. At the same time, there is a lack of motivation here and there to fight your way to Kel’Thuzad again and again – with classic TBC servers, the cards are reshuffled anyway.

However, the developers at Blizzard then managed to make the already difficult situation even worse. They released Phase 6 shortly after the launch of WoW (buy now ): Shadowlands and just before the start of the first Shadowlands – Season as well as the Christmas holidays. On Reddit, various players report that they have lost guild members to the new WoW expansion or that other communities on the server have already gone kaput or are at least fighting hard to survive.

However, other players also report that there was already a severe burnout period from August to November because the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj turned out to be so demotivatingly easy, but at the same time quite little fun as a raid. Postponing Phase 6 until January 2021 would also have killed many guilds, according to the opinion.

This is how much is going on on the Classic servers at the moment

Since our last check of the WoW Classic populations has already been a little while, let’s take a look at what the player numbers say in December. As a source for our check, we once again take the Ironforge Pro site, which in turn takes the logs on Warcraftlogs Classic as a basis to find out how many players were actively playing WoW Classic (in the Raid section) in the last week – the last update was for the period 07 December 2020 to 13 August 2020. Here are our findings:

• Most players continue to hang out on the US PvP servers Whitemane and Herod: 7,810 (9,679 in August) and 6,785 (9,215) characters were counted there, respectively.
• The largest EU server is Gehennas with 6,511 (in August with 7,835) characters.
• The largest German Classic server is still Venoxis with 5,853 (7,612) active characters (with a faction distribution of 44 percent Alliance and 56 percent Horde).
• Lucifron comes to 2,824 (4,342) active characters (at 100 percent Horde).
• Everlook comes to 5,770 (6,602) active characters (at 73 percent Alliance and 27 percent Horde)
• Razorfen comes to 3,686 (4,917) active characters (at 65 percent Alliance and 35 percent Horde)
• Dragon’s Call reaches 3,368 (4,481) active characters (at 39 percent Alliance and 61 percent Horde)
• Lakeshire comes in at 3,261 (3,719) active characters (at 69 percent Alliance and 31 percent Horde)
• Patchwerk comes to 3,782 (5,195) active characters (at 40 percent Alliance and 60 percent Horde)
• Transcendence comes in at 3,278 (4,186) active characters (at 48 percent Alliance and 52 percent Horde)
• Heartstriker comes to 2,643 (3,723) active characters (at 98 percent Alliance and 2 percent Horde)
• Unfortunately, there is again no data for Celebras.

If you want to find out more about the class distributions on your server, you only have to click on the server name on the website. The bottom line is that the player numbers have dropped noticeably in the last few months.