If you're up to playing on a WoW Classic Hardcore realm right now, you might have a hard time finding dungeon groups or even just a mate for completing an elite quest. But though many Classic HC servers feel abandoned at the moment, chances that there will be more people playing it again in the near future shouldn't be too bad.
To be fair, no one should have expected the WoW Hardcore realms to stay super highly populated. The content is more than 15 years old, the number of players at max level is relatively small, and the potential for frustration is high.
WoW Classic Hardcore is a special variant of a World of Warcraft Classic Era realm. By far the biggest difference to other World of Warcraft versions and realms is that every character death is permanent; so if you die in-game, you have to start again from the very beginning.
Nevertheless, according to our in-game experience you were still able to find a group for an elite quest or a specific dungeon if you just brought in a little patience (a little more during the last weeks); but this has heavily changed recently. The main reason for that has to be the release of the Season of Discovery realms.
WoW Classic: SoD Launch Affects HC Realm Player Population
The WoW HC realms are obviously not completely dead, but some of them are so empty that you can at least say they are in a kind of zombie status. The screenshot above these lines shows you Stormwind on Friday early afternoon on the HC realm Nek'Rosh – within 5 minutes, we only spotted a handful of other players in the Alliance's capital city and the main chat channels were also pretty silent, with only one person trying to get a Stockades group together by repeatedly using all channels (struggling to find damage dealers actually says it all).
During a second login on Friday evening (7:45 pm), we recognized a little more movement, but the difference was marginal.
We also checked the situation on theHC realm Stitches on the Horde side, and while it was a little more enlivened overall, Orgrimmar just felt as empty as Stormwind on Nek'Rosh. In contrast to that, the WotLK Classic realms we checked out as well still seem to be very popular, supporting the impression that many WoW HC players are now playing Season of Discovery instead (and every SoD realm we visited was full of life and chatter).
Is There Any Hope For WoW HC?
For many players, SoD with its adjusted game mechanics is just the more exciting way to play WoW Classic right now, but we can also tell you that once you reached level 25 (the current level cap), found your most important runes and visited the BFD raid a couple of times, you're pretty much "done", so there are good reasons for players to continue leveling up their HC character again – at least until phase 2 of SoD launches.
Though in the end no one knows how things will develop, we are quite confident that the currently very low amount of active player on HC realms will eventually step up again. Until then, you can increase your chances to find a group on a HC server a little by trying to log in at times when more people are likely to play - in the evening and during the weekend in particular. Plus, actively looking for a guild can't be a bad idea as well.