Stonetavern was last checked on 11 September and we carried three figures from that day. Two were out of date and one was not. All three are corrected here.
What changed
Barrens is at level cap 50, not 40. Our entry said cap 40 at content stage 1.5. The site's own realm selector reads "Barrens · content stage 1.5 · level cap 50".
Discord is 880, not 827. Both are the project's own figure, three weeks apart, which is the normal rate of drift for a member count.
Elwynn is level cap 60, which we had not stated at all.
And there is a dated event: the site's status panel reads "next gate · level cap 60 · Friday, October 23, 18:00 Vienna time (16:00 UTC)". That is a claim with a date on it, so it will be either true or false on 23 October, and we will say which.
The site's changelog panel reads 145 changes on record, latest Oct 1, 2026, which is a live operation rather than an announcement page.
Two realms with opposite philosophies
This is the part worth understanding, because the site is unusually explicit that its two realms are deliberately not the same product.
Elwynn is the museum. Unaltered Vanilla 1.12.1 at the final content patch, opened June 2026, never wiped, x1 rates, and specifically: no XP boost, no quality-of-life automation, no dungeon finder. One shared world with no layering, so "the person ganking you at Crossroads today is the person you'll recognise next week". Its one deliberate departure from 2006 is that Horde and Alliance share chat, groups and dungeons.
That exception is worth flagging because it is the one thing that makes Elwynn not-quite-Vanilla, and the site puts it on its own /elwynn/authentic-vanilla page rather than burying it. We would rather a server state its exception than have a tracker discover it.
Barrens is the machine. Opened July 2026, climbing Classic then TBC then Wrath, and the whole server crosses each level gate on the same day. Phase gates open on a published date; raid gates on Elwynn open when enough characters reach the level, not on a calendar.
Barrens changes are decided by vote
This is the detail no other entry in our tracker records, and it is a genuine design choice rather than a feature list.
On Barrens, progression changes are put to a vote. The first round decided three that are now live:
- A respec costs one gold.
- You can learn a third profession.
- Guilds can take both factions.
The realm also alternates between peace and open-world war every three days, and a warden NPC at each open dungeon supplies a tank, healer or caster, with Warsong Gulch filled by server characters when players are short.
Server NPCs filling a battleground is a solo-friendly mechanic in the same family as the bots we track elsewhere, and it is the first time we have seen a project describe it as a deliberate design answer to small-raid-night problems rather than as a bot population.
What they promise, and what it costs them
Both realms: no shop, no purchasable advantage, and no plan to add one. Donations cover the server bill and buy nothing else. The site is blunt about why, in a line that is either a mission statement or a recruitment pitch:
"If you want to help with the power bill, you can. Donations are support, nothing else. Nobody buys a level, a mount, or a raid spot here."
And about the rules: "The rules do not move to keep you playing", with bans logged rather than scripted and a person reading the log.
The same page says "this stays a place where names are recognised, not a number chased for its own sake", which is a small server telling you it will not grow, and readers should weigh that as a fact rather than a claim about quality.
They are competing with us, openly
The site has dedicated pages at /best-wow-private-server, /elwynn/turtle-wow-alternative, /elwynn/authentic-vanilla and /wow-forever-alternative. That last one is aimed squarely at our subject: it describes World of Warcraft: Forever launching 4 November 2026 and positions Stonetavern as the free alternative, which agrees with our own countdown.
Its Turtle WoW page states that "Turtle WoW closed its doors on 15 May 2026", which matches the shutdown date we carry in our data.
The best-wow-private-server page is the interesting one to read as a competitor rather than a subject. It sets out five questions worth asking any private server (rates, what the shop sells, one world or many, has it wiped, who runs it and are they reachable) and then answers all five about itself, including the two it says "will send some people somewhere else".
We are not going to treat that as neutral. It is marketing, it is well-written marketing, and the five questions are a reasonable checklist that happens to exclude the ones where a small server looks worst, such as population.
One asset worth naming
Stonetavern hosts a free 51-addon shelf for the 1.14.2 client, no account and no launcher required, including WeakAuras 4.0.2, GTFO 4.69.4, OmniCC 9.2.0, AtlasLootClassic, AdiBags and honorspy, and it also hosts a 1.12.1 set.
For a reader deciding whether to try a small project, that is more practically useful than anything else on the site.
What we cannot tell you
Whether either realm is fun, whether the vote system produces good decisions, and whether 880 Discord members translate into a populated realm at any given hour. Discord members are not players, we have written that in six entries today for other servers, and it applies here too. The population tier stays tiny on the basis of the site's own published figure, labelled as such.
SOURCES: Stonetavern's own homepage, /elwynn/authentic-vanilla, /elwynn/turtle-wow-alternative, /wow-forever-alternative, /best-wow-private-server and /addons/modern, all read October 2 2026 in a browser, with a control domain probed in the same batch. The Discord count, the 145-change figure, the Oct 1 changelog date, the level caps, the October 23 gate with its Vienna and UTC times, the three vote outcomes and the addon list are all quoted or transcribed from those pages. We did not create an account and did not play. Related: how we review a private server, the correction policy, and the grading scale.