The server was packed even (perhaps especially) in its final moments, with the kind of crowds the official version never sees anymore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y86hk_93d4c

My initial thoughts were that such density in Ironforge is not much compared to Vanilla or TBC high pop realms(1) from back in the day(2), and that latency is painful to watch. Then he went outside and that explained the latency and also represented probably the largest crowd I've seen in one place. I hope Morhaime and some of the other guys at Blizzard see this video.

(1)By calling it a realm instead of a server I suppose I out myself as a former WoW GM.

(2) Fairly typical player density early in Vanilla (in an atypical and hillarious situation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_WdYvwrDA

The server had 5x the population of a reatil Vanilla realm. Those were capped at 2,500 but Nostalrius regularly peaked near 13,000 concurrent players.

Their second server was also reaching ~5,000 players at the time they were shut down.

I was a raid leader/main tank for the guild who got the first ever Nefarian kill. We announced on forums that he dropped a head quest similar to Onyxia that turns in at Stormwind and people started flooding our server with new humans, thousands of them. It was insanity. To no one's surprise turning in the quest crashed the server...

It was honestly better in every single way than any vanilla WoW server ever was. Average online at any given time was >10,000 people.

When Nostralius surpassed blizzard in active players, they had to step in ;)

That's hilarious. There were also huge gatherings, etc. I found it easy to relate to the players as far as mourning the loss goes.

It reminds me of watching an MMO I loved, The Realm Online, die slowly. It's still technically around, but development has all but ceased and the player count is ~25. IIRC it was purchased by a family who eventually let all the programmers and artists go.

Would love to play Unreal Tournament here and there.. N64 Goldeneye multi-player shall suffice in the meantime

Two all time great shooters. Goldeneye, pistols only, health turned down.

I also loved all the boards an things you could do on UT, teleport disk and jumpboots for flag running etc.

Quake 3 Weapons Factory Arena mod was my jam. 16 vs 16 on dial up in ~2000-2002 was amazing. Tribes was also fun, as was UT2k3 with low grav. I always liked ridiculous mods. TF2 was / is also great, especially the madness that was 3-pg: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=egGAPrNCj0M and the Wacky Races maps: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oPP7PnEtTmQ

I still have UT99 LAN parties once in a while (maybe twice a year). Laptops and mice all over the apartment.