What is it you like about it?
Alright so lets take my current realm of Stormrage for Alliance. I’m unhappy with the high amounts of elitist activity going on. I went there for the population, but wasn’t prepared for the high amounts of high pve content I didn’t want to contend with.
Currently on Altar of Storms I’m unhappy with the few to no amount of players I run into and low activity in my guild, and general unresponsiveness from the crowd in Org lol
There’s guilds that are active and actually do stuff for starters. I’m not a hardcore raider but I pretty quickly found a pretty good guild that was fine with me doing m+ with them and the odd normal raid (which to be honest I don’t even do anymore, just m+).
The talk in trade/cities is active (again, compared to my alliance realm where you can stand in SW for 5 mins and barely have your chat scroll).
The AH is way more active and it’s a lot easier/quicker for stuff to sell I find.
That’s pretty much the trade-off though.
You either go to a high pop, high progression server (in either PvP or PvE) and deal with the “elitists”, or you basically play on a dead server. Elitism is pretty much part and parcel of being on a strong realm.
If you can deal with the elitism, the only real choice for server is one that matches your timezone/latency, or has a specific community you’re transferring there for, like Illidan’s Chinese community (and I think Zul’jin is where the French Canadians go?)
Lmao yeah I found that out after most of my guild moved from Silvermoon to Stormrage. Unfortunately Silvermoon now is even more desolate than Altar of Storms. But compared to Stormrage it was a breeze back on Silvermoon. Guess I miss that xD
I mean, that’s probably the biggest effect of WoW’s population shrinking over the years.
There aren’t really “high” or “medium” pop servers anymore. There’s basically just mega servers like Frostmourne, Stormrage, Illidan, A52, Tichondrius, etc, and then there’s maybe a smattering of “decent pop, but not mega-server” like say, Barthilas. And then basically every other realm is dead.
Are servers even a thing anymore?
Nobody raid there besides like 2-3 guild.
Even with how much of the content in this game is x-realm with LFR, LFD and Group Finder, having a higher pop server still pretty nice for the QoL.
It gives you a larger and more consistent pool of players to recruit from, and even if you’re a completely solo player, it lets you have a much better economy, especially for more niche/expensive things, like Mythic BoE’s, Mounts or Pets.
Would you say though that even with all of the crossrealm going on outside of those mentioned instances that it diminishes the QoL someone might have on a server?
Kind of like you said how there’s no real high or medium pop servers now. I don’t even take that into account anymore knowing that everyone I see will be crossrealmed - thats if I even manage to see them xD Even with crossrealm there’s still dead servers 
edit: Maybe “dead” servers. I don’t know what it would take for a server to be officially dead
Come to scenic Hyjal. We have a high pop, pretty friendly. Only drawback is our AH seems to be run by the super rich. Everything is very over priced. Other than that, there is someone in every leveling zone so finding groups is easy.
Zul’jin and Thrall are both really fun servers, lots of friendly people and guilds. Stormrage is also the equivalent to them as Alliance
Really?? I haven’t had that much fun as Alliance on Stormrage xD
Try stormrage or sargeras
There are a bunch with a decent amount…but decent community? I’m not sure that exists.
Not really. Being on a higher pop realm still offers a pretty significant increase to quality of life, even if you choose to never do content that requires manual grouping (like Mythic Raiding).
The biggest example I can give of this is the Auction House. Even if you never talk to another soul in-game and purely use LFD/R/G, chances are you’re still going to need to buy and sell stuff. Being on a high pop realm makes that significantly easier, especially for niche stuff, like transmog, pets or mounts, which may be near impossible to buy or sell on lower pop realms simply because there isn’t a market for it.
Funny enough being on a low pop realms makes buying on things off the black market AH easier xD I mean in my experience it was like that anyways.
That’s pretty much the only real perk of being on a dead realm. I have guildies who’ve got hundreds of thousands squirreled away on a bunch of dead realms just so they can pick up BMAH items easier and cheaper.
Cause you’re never gunna beat the turbonerds on a server like Frostmourne when something cool pops up on the BMAH.
Area 52, Kil’jaeden are both good. Area 52 has higher pop, funny people.
You should probably look again. We may not have as many mythic raiding guilds as a lot of servers, but we do have a healthy raiding community including some Cutting Edge guilds.
Plus, it’s a real community. If someone does bad things, chances are that word will get around about it and that person won’t have a chance to do it again in another guild.
I don’t need to look, I been there myself for over a decade. It’s only good for RP, nothing else.