The Dodgy Kebaab has a pretty interesting take on how Official Blizzard Classic servers will affect the private server scene. This topic came up on our Discord server and I figured I would share his take on it with you guys.
One interesting perspective was the affect it would have on TBC & Wrath servers. The idea being, when live WoW players play Vanilla for a few months, they may get an urge to try out the expansions. Considering there won’t be a Blizzard option for these expansions, they may turn to private servers. This will increase the population on those servers considerably.
A lot of people live in countries with unfavorable USD exchange rates. This means that some people will still have to play on private servers, so we shouldn’t see the vanilla servers simply die off.
I think what this means overall is that the scene will still exist. The exposure will probably bring new players in as well. Personally, I will be playing classic for some time and hoping that blizzard releases the other expansions but only time will tell.