It is much like SilverKnight said. (The OP's post in this thread being just ******ed).
I was there when Nelth went from like a real server to what it is now. It was like, a perfect storm.
Quite a bit had been either broken or incomplete on Nelth for a long time. Then, the Wrath servers came out, and most of the people left. The raiding guilds just vanished, everything. My own guild's GM pretty much up and disappeared along with most of its officers.
It was around that time that they started putting some dev work into Nelth. But relative to the timing of what was going on with the other expac servers, it was kinda too late + not enough. They put a lot of work into Hyjal and then Deepholm and the server had not yet had time to really benefit from that and draw people in. And at the same time, Vashj'ir was still a wreck when you consider the whole zone :( . Also: class problems to contend with (mentioning one disappointing one for me: having to live with hunters' perennially low DPS in raid, you can see the problem in a straightforward sense when comparing to the WOL from retail Cata - it's like a broad AP issue or something) .
I think that if Nelth had been fully scripted and perfect for a long-ish while before all those new server releases had happened, there may have been enough cata-enthusiasts entrenched on the server for it to have survived that and maintain a player base. But what happened was that it was kinda the least complete server and had been that way for quite some time, and one thing led to another.
I think there might be the possibility that Nelth could recover and, over time, build back up to be something like what it was, BUT, it would require that the development time be put into it such that it would be rendered as perfect a Cata emulation as the Outland server is to BC. The fixes would have to be first, and then, it could start to attract players over time. I don't think it will be the other way around.
Or on the other hand, it could be left exactly the way it is :/ . That way at least there is something there.
PS: Did they really gold squish Neltharion again? If they did, that's the opposite of what that server needed.
