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"In a forum post about the ultimate downfall of WoW, Drysc pops in to explain that WoW still has a long lifespan ahead of it.  People who say that the lack of new servers proves there are fewer and fewer new players in the game are missing the big picture.  Back before The Burning Crusade was launched, Blizzard did a series of server upgrades that left each realm down for a few days.  At the time, they said this was to make things ready for the expansion, but little did we know it would be to such an extent.  Apparently these upgrades allowed Blizzard to keep pushing the maximum realm population up all this time, as more and more players joined the game.  There are some relatively \"low\" population realms, of course, but only in comparison to the new much-increased maximum limit.  As Drysc says, \"aside from literally a handful of realms (I could count them on one hand), every other realm has a population that would have been considered high to overpopulated before the launch of Burning Crusade.\"  Only recently have certain realms become truly crowded enough to merit free transfers to other realms.People always like to talk about the eventual downfall of the strongest player in any arena, but the steady growth Drysc is talking about continues, it looks like WoW will be the biggest 800-pound gorilla in the MMO jungle for a good long time to come."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/18/ever-enlarging-wow-realms-spell-continued-success/>