Your experience isn’t fact. Sharding and CRZ are two different things.
RP realms are not sharded in old content. They can absolutely be CRZ’d with other RP realms. I’m sitting in Valdrakken with people from Argent Dawn and Scryers. Two realms not Connected to mine. Same with Earthen Ring.
MG is too populated to see much of any CRZ. But it can happen.
Temporarily.
You must not know how classic works here.
This is in addition to our existing rule that RP realms do not automatically fill areas using our Cross-Realm Zones system (although you can still enter an RP realm using CRZ if you’re grouped with a player on an RP realm).
did you miss what I said - I was talking about old content not current content.
What servers are you looking at? I ask because there was low pop servers in WOTLK.
I’m not saying the game has 12m players or anything but a server like, Lightninghoof has been dead since it was opened.
Have you considered Moon Guard?
Genuine question, I am not trying to meme on you. I don’t do any in-game RP myself and you definitely don’t need to, but MG is a very lively server for Alliance characters and I find folks all over the open world and cities.
Getting crafting orders is quite easy as well, I’ve had great experiences here and I highly recommend it to others.
All the “weird” stuff is relatively self contained to Goldshire and its own circles. I haven’t gone looking for it and I haven’t really encountered it either, which is nice.
Could be a nice change of pace for you if you’re looking for a more lively server to try out.
I’ve been saying that forever. Retail no longer needs 240 NA servers…
But some people like their empty servers and others don’t want to lose their name so I guess I can sort of see why Blizz is holding off.
So you misunderstood what it said. LOL okay then. Let me see if I can help you out here.
RP realms are not sharded in old content. That was created due to events.
CRZ, like I just told you, is absolutely a thing, but MG is too populated to see much of it. Why is this? Because of what you just quoted: RP realms do not AUTOMATICALLY fill. There has to be a threshold hit first. Which is why it’s rare you’ll see it on MG. But the threshold is hit easily on low pop RP realms. Which is why I’m always with Scryers, Earthen Ring and Argent Dawn.
And it happens EVERYWHERE on my realm. But sharding will not. Once again, MG is too populated to hit that CRZ threshold. But CRZ does exist.
You also need to keep in mind that this has broken several times and be reworked since Legion.
There’s gotta be a way around this. Let us have last names or something.
We’ve been begging for the option to give us one of the following for years: space, hyphen or apostrophe.
classy
That doesn’t change anything for guild names or communities.
Megaservers are the death of MMORPGs. That’s why Blizz did Connected Realms. They’re smart mergers.
There’s definitely a way around this too. I’m just not intelligent enough to think of one 
You understand how cross-realm zones work, right? The overwhelming majority of servers are dead and have been for quite awhile.
There is no way to keep the community feel intact with megaservers. Old Republic tried to keep server names on guild names for a while and then forced those guilds to name change down the line.
RP died, communities died, our BMAHs would be down to one that’s constantly gold capped.
You’ll be able to join guilds cross server next expansion. They aren’t destroying everything with megaservers any time soon.
A couple of stuff is happening to make the game less popular.
WoW is an aging game not too many new people are joining to keep up with people leaving.
Shadowlands nearly cause the game to implode for a variety of reasons.
Not too many came back for DF.
The design change from daily to weekly quests and WQ have made people play less or focus on old content. There is still people playing but they are spread out on every zone in the game.
Its the end of the expansion and season 4 doesn’t appeal to the player base that want new raids and dungeons.
Nobody plays Retail that way. RP realms are good for RP. If you want to play WoW and pretend it’s 2004 try Classic. I’m not trying to troll but you seem to have serious misunderstanding about the game you are attempting to play.
Gotta break a few eggs I guess. We straight up don’t need this many realms.
That’s almost exactly how I play. I actually double and triple checked the OP’s name to make sure I wasn’t responding directly to me.
The realms are fine. They aren’t changing. Deal with it.
I haven’t visited my Proudmoore toons in a while, but it used to be jam packed with horde (I am horde on that server).