Mr Chonks wrote:
Insofar as I understand, whether the servers are physical or virtual is a bit of an irrelevance. You still need to decide what to do with the instances the players are on. You could lose the ability to play with your friends if you’re moved to one instance and they’re moved to another.
Yes. This.
Historically it's caused serious issues for the playerbase when servers have dropped below the minimum viable population.
When this happens Blizzard offer free realm transfers for the remaining players on that server, and generally give the option of two or three other servers that are similar to the server that's being shut down in terms of economy size, player progression through PVE and PVP content, and that sort of thing.
Even then it's really quite disruptive to the playerbase that's being moved, and for the playerbase on the server that's being moved to.
For example all it takes is one really wealthy clan to move en masse to a different server, and they could unbalance an entire established economy. Similarly, a hardcore PVP guild arriving on a server with a less skilled playerbase, could see its entire PVP scene thrown into disarray, and this stuff really matters to the players.
It's a relatively trivial task for Blizzard to spin up as many Classic servers as they want to, they've explicitly stated they won't go overboard because 3-6 months down the line they'll be pissing off a lot of people if they need to start closing underpopulated servers down and forcing everyone to move to different servers. I mean, people literally get very attached just to the server they're on, and they don't want to move to another server. This stuff matters to WoW players.
Sorry Kovacs, but when it comes to WoW, (as a game, not the infrastructure it runs on), you're short on facts here.