A third directory crawl, this time a vote-ranked list of 22 realms. Sixteen were not ours. Nine verified first-party and added today. Six point at dead domains.
The nine
| Server | What it is | Tier basis |
|---|---|---|
| EternalWoW Remorse | 255 instant on rebuilt AzerothCore, Anubis gear, top of their votes | unknown, votes are not players |
| Heroes WoW | 255 Reborn funserver, counter reads 0 | tiny, site's own zero |
| MegaForge | Solo-journey server, Warsong Online | unknown, no counter published |
| Nostalgia Servers | Three realms, two Online one Offline | unknown, no counter published |
| Demontold | Site title reads Coming Soon | dev, their words |
| GrandMU | Blizzlike x5, five languages, 2 online | tiny, site's own 2 |
| Rupture WoW | 100x with level-120 endgame, listed elsewhere as Areos | unknown, counter did not load |
| Winterkage | WotLK plus TBC off one realmlist | unknown, counters read Loading |
Plus Ivalice Reborn (server page): opened October 1 per its own news, level-80 fun server with required custom patches.
Two bands from live counters, five unknown, two dev.
Six dead domains on a ranked list
Their number-two entry by votes, ForeverWoW, does not resolve at root or on three alternate TLDs. Neither do HeroWoW, Twistedfate, Marble-WoW, Shadow of Azeroth or Asgard WoW (the last returning Cloudflare 403 rather than DNS failure).
A ranked directory that keeps dead domains listed is measuring its own staleness, not the scene. Votes accumulate on entries nobody re-checks, which is the same failure our own sweep spent a week correcting, except we publish the correction and they publish the ranking.
Whispers of Nyalotha, a Vanilla+ project with a custom Blademaster class, has no website at all, only a directory page describing active development with no ETA. Evaluated and skipped: no URL means no entry.
The rename worth recording
Rupture WoW's site carries the title Rupture WoW while a directory lists it as Areos WoW. The entry follows the site's own title and notes the alias, because a tracker that names a server differently from its own front page is manufacturing confusion.
Its published realmlist is a bare IP address, which is worth stating plainly: no hostname means no DNS to lapse, but also no identity beyond four numbers.
SOURCES: each project's own site, read October 4 and 5 2026 with a control domain probed in the same batches; the directory's pages, used solely to discover project URLs. Player counts are the projects' own widgets, self-reported. We did not create accounts and did not play. Related: how we review a private server, the correction policy, and the fifteen-server batch.