The private server scene loses realms every year, but 2026 has been heavier than most. Of the projects in our tracker, nine shut down this year, and they fall into two clear waves: three in May, five on one day in September, plus one independent closure later that month.
This is a reference post. It lists what closed, when, and why, drawn from our own tracker, where every dead entry carries a dated shutdown and a reason. If a date here changes, it changes in the tracker first, and this page follows.
The September wave: the Ascension network
On September 4 2026, the Ascension network's whole line went offline at once under a Blizzard cease-and-desist, reached, our entries note, by mutual agreement in a case numbered 8:26-cv-01506.
- Ascension - the classless hub itself, parent to the experiments below.
- Bronzebeard - Warcraft Reborn, the original nine classes plus Mystic Enchantments.
- Conquest of Azeroth - 21 custom lore-derived classes with three specs each, still in alpha at the time.
- Area 52 - classless free-pick with Mystic Enchantments, high-risk PvP and hardcore.
- Elune - the seasonal realm with Wildcard random abilities and Draft Mode.
Five realms, five different designs, one day. Note that Conquest of Azeroth is not the same project as the live Conquest of AzerothCore or the independent Conquest Reborn; the names collide, and the tracker keeps them apart.
The May wave
On May 15 2026, three long-running realms closed under cease-and-desist:
- Turtle WoW - the Vanilla+ community that defined the category.
- Stormforge (Mistblade) - the network's Mists of Pandaria realm.
- Stormforge (Wrath) - its Wrath realm.
The independent closure
- Project Alterac - a progressive WotLK realm whose Phase 3 launched August 8 2026, then closed on September 15 2026. No legal action is recorded here: the operator's stated causes, as our entry carries them, were the timing of the Forever beta and out-of-pocket CDN costs. It is the one 2026 shutdown on this list that "cease-and-desist" does not explain.
Before 2026
For context, four realms in the tracker closed earlier and stay listed with their dates: ArgusWoW (May 15 2022), Felmyst (June 1 2023), WORS, World of RuneScape (June 1 2023) and Everlook (December 1 2023).
Why we keep them listed
A closed server is not deleted from the tracker. The entry stays, marked dead, with a date and a reason, because the record is the point: it is how a reader who remembers a name finds out what happened to it, and how the count stays honest. We do not guess at a shutdown. Where a site carries a shutdown notice with no date on it, as one did this autumn, we withhold the entry rather than invent a day.
The wider enforcement story, from the May actions through the autumn economy holds, is in our crackdown explainer.
SOURCES: our own tracker entries, each carrying a dated shutdown and a reason, read October 16 2026. Related: the crackdown explainer, how we review a private server, and the correction policy.