Warmane - Icecrown

Icecrown is one of the most popular wotlk servers, and is high-rated. I recommend it to everyone who don't want 1x rates. Warmane has been running for many years, and in my opinion is very stable.

Pay to win does not exist on any server. Paying for gear won't teach you a rotation or give you brains to use what spell/ability when nor give you raid experience. Sure you can buy things in the server and sure you might get taken by a guild who only bases skill off of your gearscore. But you'll never be good in pve or pvp unless you know what you are doing. This making pay to win really not even a thing as 99% of players can't play their class no matter the gear or items.

Icecrown has lasted for years because it is a place where people with less time can level up and get to see content faster.

Gold squishes to keep the economy in balance are a yearly thing.

Icecrown has the better retail scripts vs all other warmane servers.

I've personally been on the realm before it merged ragnaros and deathwing, before the rename to warmane, before the moltdown in 2015.

Yes it does have its flaws and it does not have 10k players due to how warmane calculates players online by account over an hour period, but it does enjoy a larger playerbase than pretty much anyone out there and has stood the test of time.

I've been playing on this server for a few months now. I have two accounts, server full on both (one Horde one Alli because why not). I'm pretty pleased with the quality of the server, and I personally haven't encountered any major bugs. The odd graphical and AH glitch here and there but nothing that's hurt or massively hindered my overall game at all. The accelerated exp rate is nice and the fact that the server itself is free to download and play is awesome. (There is a store, but it's only on the website and isn't shoved at you ingame.)

I have seen people complaining that the WM servers aren't "blizzlike" enough but you can't please everyone. As someone who grew up through WoW including WotLK and played on official for over a decade, I'm satisfied with the server itself.

A word of caution on the community, however.
I've encountered so much undue entitlement on this server, (on *both* sides before you start feeling high and mighty about your faction). Major city gold begging spam up the wazoo; random people whispering me out of absolutely nowhere to tell me what I'm doing wrong or where I should be for my level (and not just offering gentle advice but being very rude and bossy); random group invites from level 80s in dungeons trying to reset and just expecting me to accept while I'm just minding my own business; and the latter two types getting all pissy when I'm not receptive to or appreciative of being bossed around or having invites pop up in my face.
For comparison I did of course encounter toxicity on official servers, as you will in any MMO no matter its genre. But for example, in over a decade of playing on official I only got random bossy whispers twice. 2 times. I've been playing on WM for under half a year and have had it happen 4 times already. Like wow you people need to learn some manners and let people play the way they want to.
And then there's the scummier bad behaviour, like in a starting zone when I made a new toon, there was a player running around on their mount following people around and repeatedly requesting a guild charter signature. They followed me around and shoved it in my face 5 times. And because of the bar on emotes and whispers until level 10 I couldn't even tell them to fuck off lol
I haven't tried dungeons or gods forbid, raiding, and feel very discouraged from even bothering at this point.

My one biggest gripe with WM as a whole is that I wish the servers were PvE, because on PvE servers you can enable or disable PvP at will. You're not forced into it. I loathe PvP servers and just want to quest or whatever in peace. It's very annoying to be stomped repeatedly by players in crazy high tier PvP gear swooping down out of nowhere while I'm minding my own business.
Oh and the fake queue/pop numbers rumour is 100% real, go find my WM MoP server review for a quick rundown on how I found that out for myself.

But the population level is great, there's always crowds in org and SW at every hour, and tonnes of stuff on the AH. Economy/gold value is similar to retail. If you wanna make gold fast (without begging) just go spend an hour farming old world stuff like leather and ore, and I personally find small eggs and sagefish to sell really well.

My grumbling about the other players aside, I do enjoy playing here and can see myself staying for a long time.

tl;dr: server itself is pretty good for the most part; people who play on it often leave a lot to be desired.

My account has been banned from this server for botting.
The problem : I have never used any bot of my life !

I will never create a new account on this very bad server.
I will try a better one (probably not difficult ...)

12000 players, 100% full script, pvp + pve

Worst comunity i have ever seen, heaps of bugs, they only care about money. The population and que are fake.

Horrible server with fake population.

The following pirate server which proofs that the best way is playing on the official servers or not to play at all.