The tracker has 104 servers in scope. Twelve days before BlizzCon 2026 opens in Anaheim, and four days before the Ascension shutdown takes the largest classless network of the past decade offline, here is the picture the data draws by itself. No outside reporting, no forecasts — just the count of what's on the list, how it lines up by expansion, and what the dead column looks like.
The expansion that won't die
WotLK is still the centre of gravity. 35 of the 104 tracked servers — a third — are WotLK 3.3.5a or WotLK-adjacent. 32 of those 35 are playable. Only one is dead, and that one is a Stormforge relic. 2 are in development. The expansion's core is Chromiecraft at 3.3k+ Discord, Warmane at large population, and a long tail of mid-size communities — Dalaran-WoW, TrueWoW, WoW-Mania, UltimoWoW, Stormgarde, Triumvirate-WoW — that have been running for years. WotLK 3.3.5a on AzerothCore and TrinityCore is the most operationally boring, most replicated, and most populated part of the entire private scene.
Vanilla is next at 16 servers, all but one playable. 15 live. 1 dead (Everlook, abandoned December 2023). The Vanilla column is what it always has been: small, loyal, mostly blizzlike, with a heavy new-progressive wave this year from Ashen WoW, Feenix, GryffinWow, Origins WoW Asia, True Azeroth and Warlords of Azeroth — six fresh or relaunched servers in the last twelve months. None of them cracked large. Most are tagged tiny.
Where Vanilla+ is, after Turtle
The interesting column is Vanilla+, and the numbers are sobering. 18 servers tagged Vanilla+. 8 playable, 7 in development, 3 dead. Of the 8 playable ones, only 1 is large: Capybara WoW, the ex-Turtle SEA admin spinoff. 4 are small, 3 are tiny. 10 of the 18 are unknown population — meaning even the trackers don't have a credible size estimate.
The 3 dead: Turtle WoW itself (May 15, Blizzard C&D), Bronzebeard, and Conquest of Azeroth — both part of the Ascension network, scheduled to die September 4. The 7 in development include Project Epoch: Reborn, Revelation WoW, Epsilon, Anarchy 2.0, Everwood WoW, Duskhaven, WallCraft and Prophecy: Fall of Lordaeron. Read those names and notice how many of them have no public launch date, no public population, and no public Discord number anyone can verify.
The honest read: the post-Turtle Vanilla+ scene is small, fragile, mostly unknown-sized, and the supply of "new" projects far exceeds the population that wants to play them. Turtle itself was the only Vanilla+ project in the 2024-2026 cycle that ever broke 50k active players, and it was shut down. Nothing on the list is positioned to replace it.
The dead column
11 dead servers, 8 of them in 2026 alone. The 2023 deaths — Felmyst (C&D), Everlook (abandoned), WORS (abandoned) — predate the current enforcement wave. 8 dead in 2026 means 8 in 8 months. None in 2024 or 2025. The whole 2026 death list is the 2026 enforcement wave: Turtle WoW, Stormforge Mistblade, Stormforge Wrath in May, and now the five Ascension realms — Ascension, Area 52, Elune, Bronzebeard, Conquest of Azeroth — on September 4. All C&D. 9 of 11 dead are C&D, 2 are abandoned. Abandoned servers were a 2023 phenomenon. C&D is the only kind of death on the list now.
Population distribution
The pop tier breakdown tells its own story: 35 small, 32 tiny, 24 unknown, 11 large, 2 medium. Most of the scene is small or tiny. Only 11 servers — about 10% of the total — are large, and the medium tier is almost empty: 2 servers. The "medium" private server, in the 500-2000 concurrent range, has largely been squeezed out — either a server grows to large or it falls to small. The middle is unstable.
The 24 unknown entries are almost entirely Vanilla+ in-development projects plus a handful of classless ones — exactly the projects where the team has not opened the doors, or has opened them briefly, and the population data has not been public since. This is consistent with the Vanilla+ analysis above: the in-development projects outnumber the credible-sized live ones, and most of them are the same size as each other in terms of "we don't know."
Classless, in a post-Ascension frame
The classless scene is the part most disrupted by the next four days. 5 tracked classless servers: 1 playable, 1 in development, 3 dead. The one playable is GrimfallWoW (Classless at 60, open beta since March 2026, tiny). The one in development is Everwood WoW, no launch date. After September 4, the classless scene on the tracker is 1 small, 1 unknown, and the gap that Area 52 leaves will not be filled by anything on the current list.
A numbers-only BlizzCon preview
The two stories that converge on Anaheim in twelve days:
- The Camelot / Classic+ question. 37 entries in our Classic+ tracker — leaks, rumours, datamines — and 18 Vanilla+ servers, of which 7 are in development with no launch date. If Blizzard announces a Classic+ project on stage, the 7 in-development Vanilla+ servers become either the new community or a cautionary tale, depending on whether they can ship before the official one does. Most of them cannot.
- The enforcement floor. 9 of 11 dead servers are C&D, all in 2026. The tracker has never had a year like this. The next project that crosses whatever line the Turtle and Ascension cases drew will be the third domino. There is no public line, so every project over a certain size and a certain level of commercial activity is now running an unpriced option on a federal lawsuit.
The numbers do not predict BlizzCon. They just say: the community is bigger than at any point in its history (104 servers, 77 playable, a lot of recent additions), but more concentrated and more fragile. WotLK carries it. Vanilla+ is the part everyone is watching. The dead column is filling in real time. Four days until Ascension. Twelve until BlizzCon. The next twelve months will be defined by which of those two trend lines bends first.