So, who figured that the people playing World of Warcraft emulators would all jump ship in order to play on the official version of WoW Classic? Raise your hand and move to the right side of the room. And everyone who thought that players would find some excuse to keep not paying a subscription and stay on private servers, move to the left side… and now meet back in the middle because you’re both partly right. It turns out that servers like Kronos and Elysium have definitely noticed a drop-off in play, but the servers are also not devoid of players just yet.
So why are people not moving on to the official servers? The stated reasons run from the fact that layering didn’t exist in vanilla and thus renders the game not classic to this justification of not paying a subscription from the operator of Kronos:
Many in the community (myself included) do not believe we should be charged the same fee for a 15 year old game as for a current game that has literally thousands of additional hours of content in it, and we see it as yet another way of them being able to pad their subscription numbers.
Ultimately, it’s likely that there are still a few private server diehards who will swap over, and it’s a similarly open question how many private servers will remain viable in the wake of the diminishing population. It’s interesting to watch regardless; after years of asking for the original game, a lot of people are happier to play it in an official form. But not everyone.
