Any reason not to play in the extremely high pop servers?

Community General Discussion
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Is it always better to play in the most popular servers for better “overall experience”?

Surely there’re more opportunities for guilds in these popular servers, and their economies are hyper active. (which I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing)

Other than that…
I am not familiar with the pvp (BG and world PvP) sharding mechanics, but with LFG & LFR, playing in a less crowded high pop server seems decent enough for casual players like me?

The expansion launch or major patch wait time in extremely popular server like Area52 (I am in rn), Illidan, Tichondrius, Stormrage… could be a temporary problem.

But I surely don’t want to enroll in a realm that its people are slowly migrating to those extremely high pop server and slowly become a “dead” server (medium servers seem pretty empty to me whenever I make test toons in them.) Who knows how long the Horde will remain the majority?

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I think you answered your own question

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3

More people :woman_shrugging:

4

I transferred off of Area 52 to Zul’jin. A52 is more populated, but zuljin is plenty active.

Some people will say it “doesnt matter”, but patches and expansions lead to wait times to login to the most populous servers. And all the advantages you mentioned are not noticeable on servers like zuljin. Only if you go from a place like a52 to a graveyard server would it be noticeable.

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5

More people can be nice but it can also be a pain when you’re trying to do something without shared objectives.

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If you’re casual, I don’t see any real downside to Area 52. A bit extra lag here and there, queue time at the beginning of an expansion…but if you don’t have a raid you have to be at, no big deal imo. I think the good outweighs the bad.

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Ikr, still I want to know why people decided to play in servers other than the most crowded one.

It’s almost like I am asking why people choose to live in suburban than in cities lmao.

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Proudmoore is incredibly active and it makes the whole world seem more alive.

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True, I always have to turn off players’ nameplates in Orgrimmar so I am not playing 30 fps…

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I purposefully made Alliance characters on the lowest pop RPG server I could find: Earthen Ring.

My reason is that I only like solo PvE and don’t like having to compete with other players trying to kill quest objective enemies. The choice of RPG server in retrospect was because I didn’t really understand what it meant. If I were to redo it, I wouldn’t care if the server was RPG or not.

Why not play a single player game you might ask? Because I can’t think of any other single player game that has the amount of content that WoW has. Since I only started in Legion, this game really has no end of things for me to discover and explore and do. Plus, I don’t mind seeing a few other players out there sometimes. It adds to the randomness and shakes things up.

I also have horde toons on Argent Dawn, which is pretty low pop but not anywhere near as empty as Earthen Ring. But my Argent Dawn toons were from when I first started at my girlfriend’s urging to play together, so I didn’t really pick that realm, just joined her there.

That’s my 2 cents anyway.

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11

I am actually in a similar boat, I just started before SL launch, I plan to get all loremasters from all zones before I start doing endgame raiding and mythic+ stuff, so I wouldn’t really need any guild in the next year or two. My first expansion is most likely the next one.

But how about pvp in low pop server? Do they exist at all?

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Worse AH. And Worse trade chat.

Maybe that’s your thing, so you don’t have to listen to all the politics in there.

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Is it because of bots? Are they more common in those extreme pop servers?
I do notice professions do make as much gold as in other realms, the materials are way cheaper than other servers.

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No I mean Low pop sers have worse AH.

So you can sell something with higher price than high pop server, but they are expensive to buy too and not many buyers.

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15

There’s so many dead servers, I don’t get why they don’t just merge them into a megaserver

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These days, the server pop isn’t the problem. It’s the faction population of that server. I had to leave dragonmaw(one of the first servers) about 2 months ago. It got to the point that it was 1 alliance to about 10 or 20horde.

I made a horde toon, and Man was that place lively!

With all the sharding and cross realms you wouldn’t think it would matter, but it’s very very disheartening running through alliance cities and being the only one there. You might see another alliance out leveling, but I know you’ll see at least 10 horde.

My point is that servers are much less balanced now that before. Without pvp servers it doesn’t matter much, just as long as you’re on the side with ppl.

I don’t know exactly how warmode works, if it’s only your group of servers, or of there’s more involved.

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I play on one of the most populated servers. When the new expansion came out I had a wait queue for a week and a half.

Outside of that, everything is better on high-pop IMO, and I’ve played on dozens of servers over the past 13 years.

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Queue times on log in during patch and release days… that’s the only real downside I can think of…

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Its why I transferred to hellscream back in mid-tbc.

Back then it had 5-6 healthy raiding guilds horde side and an extremely active arena/bg/casual playerbase as well.

Judging by the 12 other realms I’m now linked with I dont think we are doing so hot.

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Outside of potential queues for a few days early in a new xpack/major patch, there’s no real reason not to play on the “megaservers” other than these 2:

  1. You roleplay.
  2. You already rolled elsewhere and don’t have the funds to transfer / motivation to start from scratch.

You might have to get addons to filter chat a bit. But that’s not much of a downside.

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