Given the issues with loading into certain realms during this launch period, I have some questions about realms:
How important is realm choice? What can I only do with other people on my realm? What works across realms?
How should a new player choose a realm? Does faction matter?
If I transfer a character from one realm to another, do I lose anything?
Finally, why are there separate realms in modern WOW?
The importance varies depending on how you want to play, from very important to not important at all. You can do all content except mythic raiding (until the hall of fame fills), goon guilds, trade gold and use auction houses cross faction.
Based on what they want to do. Want to progress through raids seriously? High pop realm. Want a healthy economy? High pop realm. Want a world full of people? High pop realm. Want to play solo and pretend you’re not in an mmo? Low pop realm. Faction matters because realms are normally dominated by one faction.
No. Maybe the name if it’s already taken.
Names of players and guilds mostly.
It’s important to realize that not all high pop/full realms are in the same category in reality. There are a handful of mega-servers that just have nuts populations. There are also plenty of other high/full servers that still have strong populations, but are significantly smaller than the mega realms. Area 52 and Illidan seem like the two big ones. (I’m not sure that any of the alliance-dominant ones really fit into that category these days, but the two that are closest would be Stormrage and Sargaras.)
If you want to clear mythic raids within a few weeks of them coming out, you’ll want to be on a mega-sever and play Horde.
If you want to get the cutting edge achievement (meaning clearing Mythic content before the next tier comes out) then you’ve got more options. Pretty much any horde heavy high pop realm will have guilds that get cutting edge. Alliance-side you’ll probably want either Stormrage or Sargaras.
If you want walk-up out in the wild role playing, then Moonguard (alliance) and Wryrest Accord (both factions) are the only real choices. You can find guild based RP and sometimes event-based RP on any RP server, but horde-side do some research, as many RP realms are alliance-heavy and don’t have much horde side activity.
For everything else, realm choice doesn’t matter that much. (It mainly affects what guilds are availalbe. Bigger realms have more guilds, but a smaller realm might have the perfect fit for you.)
If you are on a low pop RP realm, questing in non-current areas is pretty quiet, as RP realms don’t shard in non-current content. (Which can be nice if you just don’t want to deal with people, but will make any non-soloable group quests near impossible to complete at level.) Even the higher pop RP realms will be fairly quiet in non-current content due to the lack of sharding. In current content, sharding means that you’ll see similar numbers of people regardless of realm.
For non-RP realms, sharding will meant that you won’t feel much of a difference in any content out in the world.
Edit: I see your posting character is Alliance on Area-52. That’s unfortunately a worst case scenario situation. You get the launch downsides of a mega-server, but the alliance population is very low pop. (Like, it’s worse than most actual low pop servers.) So, I would definitely consider looking at some other realms. You might want to level up a bit on some other servers to check them out. If you want to stay alliance and have a large community but avoid the biggest servers, Dalaran and Proudmoure are probably the best high-pop (but not mega-pop) Alliance dominated servers.
Go to wowprogress dotcom and sort by population it also shows alliance/horde spits. I recommend the highest pop servers I’m on Illidan. Here are some benefits.
Better Auction House (server cluster based)
More guilds, more City/Trade chat, more people in town
More local players in zones
Faster world questing if there are higher zone populations. 5 people can tag a mob and all get kill credit.
If the game suffers low populations or cross realm issues at some point in the future, , the highest pop servers will still be active.