WoW Classic players get together to mourn shutdown of one of game’s tiniest servers

World of Warcraft Classic will soon enter a new era when the game makes its transition from the Wrath of the Lich King expansion to Cataclysm. 

With the rollover from expansion to expansion, several changes will be made, including the shutdown of low-population servers in an effort to consolidate the game’s playerbase. One such server, Old Blanchy, will be sunsetted when Cataclysm launches next month, but players remaining on that realm made sure they wouldn’t go down without paying homage to their home one last time. In a thread posted to Reddit earlier today, WoW Classic players on Old Blanchy shared memories of their time together, capped off with a screenshot of the server’s small population bundled up together in celebration. 

“On Old Blanchy it was definitely a small town vibe and a relatively tight community,” the original poster of the thread, a user named Deltaxun, said in the comments. “You see the same people in the sewers, you see the same people before raid times at the bank. I’m sure a lot of us will miss that feeling but ultimately this move is a good thing for us.”

The players on the server notably got together in Westfall, at the Jansen Stead. This location should be familiar for players who’ve completed the Westfall storyline, as it’s the same place where you can find their servers’ namesake, the horse named Old Blanchy. If you look closely in the players’ screenshot, you can even see the horse mixed in with the crowd. 

The server only had a few active guilds on the Horde side, according to the thread. There are only a few thousand players in total, still on Old Blanchy, with only several hundred representing the Horde in the 70/30 percent split across the factions, according to WoW stats site IronForge. 

Most of the Horde players on Old Blanchy will migrate over to the Mankrik server, which, according to the original poster of the Reddit thread, is the only server that has an available transfer option and an existing population of players on the Horde side of the faction divide. Still, that move is going to be a few weeks away, as WoW Cataclysm Classic doesn’t launch in full until May 20. The pre-patch for the upcoming Classic expansion will go live on April 30.