Is WotLK the future or the past?
I've been around Warmane and private servers in general for many, many years now.
I remember a time when TBC was the cutting edge. The rampant presence of servers whose P2W practices and under the table corruption were so outrageous by today's standards that they seem like a faraway bad joke. Custom "fun" servers along vanilla and TBC servers that had very different goals compared to today. Then came the times of Wrath. Don't really have to praise the expansion—everyone here knows its ups and downs—but AT and the Trinity core really did launch a new era for private servers. Things kept moving forward with the presence of more and more "x1 blizzlike" servers. As retail moved in one direction it felt like the need of the private server community was to experience the old—and not just any old but a good, high quality vintage WoW experience.
When Cataclysm emulation arrived though things stopped moving forward as much. The love for the expansion wasn't quite there while the challenges for the developers were starting to get much harder. For a while it had the "new" expansion charm in the community, but eventually that faded. A common theme in all the expansions that followed: the great difficulty in scripting and emulating them correctly, especially when taking into account the dubious popularity.
Skip to the current year. Blizzard has just launched a successful new expansion and Classic is still pulling its weight with possibly BC on the horizon. In the private server community the vanilla scene is a graveyard, a ghost of what Nostalrius and its predecessors amounted to—which is not surprising, after all they are the people that made Classic happen. Some of the other expansions... exist, let's put it that way. No specifics but there is one outlier for each one usually—and even those aren't really booming while actually possessing good quality scripting. WoD, Legion and BFA are exceptions because of obvious reasons—be it significant unpopularity or great difficulty in emulating them up to the current quality standards. Legion in particular seems the last cry for help of the community, but having played it and having seen the state of the various servers, its realization is years away. Wrath seems to be the only constant. The only middle ground still different enough from retail to encapsulate the old WoW while maintaining enough of the new, more casual-friendly features.
It's a grim look for the private server community outside of this one expansion. It has become so familiar and supported that its popularity is unmatched now that vanilla is gone. TBC never seemed to catch on, a strange in-between of the archaic vanilla and the new old of Wrath. Cataclysm seemed to maybe have the potential to be a hit in the community, but be it the weak lore or the disappointing last patch, it just wasn't a good match against the 3.3 experience. Anything from MoP onward is barely worth talking about, still in its infancy and years away from the "x1 blizzlike" standards we have these days.
Given all this, what do you think Warmane players? Is this the expansion that will stay until the end—whatever that might be for private servers? Is there any expansion whose serious development could overthrow WotLK in your opinion?
