Do realms matter much?
I’m in a medium populated one, would it be better to be in one w/a higher population or does it really matter since you can pretty much group w/anyone?
I noticed the realm and faction transfers were on sale, was wondering if that had anything to do w/the new expac. Haven’t been on in a bit.
I mean for guilds and AH economy
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Only point of realms now is that Blizzard can rake in tons of money on server transfers, and pretend like there’s nothing they can do because things have always been set up this way
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Also means roleplayers dont get merged in with non-RP and get ourselved bullied and harassed more.
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I prefer RP realms over Normal realms. It’s just been in my experience that RP realms are just a tad bit nicer.
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Reasons realms matter:
Economy - Auction Houses are faction wide, but not region wide. Availability and Pricing of items on the AH is going to be determined by your realm, and larger realms are going to have have healthier economies in general.
Guild Opportunities - You can pug pretty much everything these days, but if you’re looking to escape the pug scene and actually get to know some people (or just don’t want to deal with re-progressing every time since it’s different people every time in pugs), you’re going to be looking for a Guild. Dead Realms have very little in the way of functioning high-end content Guilds. Large Realms have a lot more opportunities to find a Guild running the content you want to run at the times you want to run it. Also, Mythic Raiding in general, since that’s still artificially limited.
RP Realms & CRZ - RP Realms do not CRZ in old content zones. You can run through Westfall and find no one but the people on your realm (or who those who have been manually invited to a group by people on your realm). This is a boon for RP (it limits randoms on servers where RP has died griefing RP on those where it has not) and could be a pro or a con for a non-roleplayer depending on what you’re looking for. Normal Realms have very busy zones due to CRZ. RP realms do not since they’ve effectively opted out.
RP Realms & Sharding - In the past, Blizzard did not shard RP Servers outside of current-xpack zones (with exceptions for xpack launches in capital cities because it was necessary). Again, a boon for RP, as it means players in the same area will not be separated arbitrarily. Non-roleplayers might prefer this just for the sake of being able to run into the people on your server more consistently, but otherwise is probably not a big deal. HOWEVER, Blizzard has gone back and forth on this feature of RP Realms a number of times and I don’t actually know the specifics of how its functioning right now, if at all. Someone else might be able to clarify.
“Community” - This doesn’t really apply to all realms anymore, but there are still a handful of realms that foster somewhat “known” communities, which is something a lot of people feel is “lost” since so much has gone cross-realm post-WotLK. Moon Guard gave me that old vibe and that’s why I main here now (though ofc it also has the whole Goldshire thing which does leak into the culture to some degree). Proudmoore is (or was?) effectively the LGBT-friendly server (more than normal). Emerald Dream was (is? Idk since Warmode) the World PvP Server. That kind of thing. You can do everything on any realm but there have always been a handful worth noting for things like that.
Also, just… socializing in general. Populated realms tend to use /lookingforgroup as a global chat. It’ll never pop off as much as Trade Chat since you have to manually join, but it’s nice to be able to do whatever out the world and actually be able to casually chat with the server. And of course Trade Chat itself will be more active on a higher pop realm. I know some people /leave Trade immediately, but I like having that interaction with people, even if half of it is people trolling each other.
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Would it be better to join a realm group? Or just a highly populated realm? I’m thinking about switching. I play both factions.
My limited experience with “Realm Groups” is that the combined cluster still ends up being relatively low pop unless they’ve slapped some dead realms onto a realm that’s already very high pop on its own (which I think they’ve done with at least 1 of the clusters).
The connected realms function as 1 big realm though, more or less, so if you’re happy with the population, there’s no additional downside to rolling on a connected realm cluster AFAIK.
I want to just recommend finding a higher pop server rather than looking at clusters, but honestly my experience with them is limited enough where it wouldn’t be fair me to say that with full confidence.
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