Ghost town: WoW players debate which zone has the lowest population

With a world as wide and expansive as the one found in World of Warcraft, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the zones are nearly abandoned entirely. 

For as much of the player base that can be found in the Dragon Isles, there is as much uninhabited empty space across the game’s older zones. Think to yourself: Genuinely, when was the last time you were in a mid-game Classic zone like the Searing Gorge? 

In a recent thread posted to the official WoW subreddit, players debated which zones were the least populated in the current version of the game, and the answers varied across multiple continents, proving that more of the game may be left to ruin than we think. 

The most popular answer across the thread for the question of “least populated zone” was Silithus, the southwestern-most zone on Kalimdor. The zone was notorious back in the day for its lack of questing content, and even in modern WoW, there are few reasons to go there. 

Some players argued against the claim that Silithus is the least populated zone in the game, and we tend to agree with that line of thinking. Silithus is home to Ahn’Qiraj, which, despite the fact that it’s a near-20-year-old raid, it’s still worth farming for reputation grinders and completionists. Plus, the major addition of Sargeras’ sword to the middle of the zone at the end of Legion has made Silithus more populated with players catching up on the story, despite the fact that it hasn’t been current content in years. Still, Silithus is a solid candidate. 

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Other WoW players claimed that zones such as the Arathi Highlands and Hinterlands were some of retail WoW’s dead spots, for which there are definitely cases to be made. Those two zones, despite their extreme prominence in Classic WoW, are relatively dead-silent in the modern version of the game. That could change, though, with the addition of the Eastern Kingdoms Dragonriding Cup later this month, when races unlock in more of the game’s older zones.

As for us, our pick for the least-populated zone in WoW is probably Felwood. The zone has very few quests, and even if you’re leveling through Kalimdor as your choice for your Chromie Time timeline, there are other zones that are more experience-rich than Felwood. 

Felwood is a small strip of land found sandwiched between Darkshore, Mount Hyjal, and Moonglade—all of which are strong candidates themselves—but its very small size, relative lack of questing content, and few reasons to revisit in the endgame make Felwood our surefire nominee for the “least visited place in retail WoW.”