If you want to play on a dead server because a name you like is available there, what are the downsides?
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Essentially none BUT:
Crafting and item availability.
You can solve both by being in a large active guild and can buy the items you need and move them through warbank. Mats are largely WoW-wide now anyway.
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None. All servers are part of a linked cluster now. You will have interactions with them as though they are on your server. In addition, phasing puts you in contact with even more servers.
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Getting items crafted if you don’t have a guild that does it basically is the one huge downside currently.
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Servers doesn’t matter now
Groups is now cross server and cross factions
Auction house is now region wide
Servers are nearly all connected.
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I changed to a dead server for my names over a decade ago.
Server’s still dead af.
And it was all more than worth it for my names.
Also 10x better to hunt rares and hunter pets, which I do.
Don’t listen to the pretenders talking about “economy” or “crafting” or “group content” on their nothing alts. They’re talking to see their avatars on the internet.
Cross-realms and cross-realm AH means I get all the enchants and crafts I need to push content just as much as anyone else, with the same cross-realm queue times. Anyone that says otherwise is just guessing what they imagine dead servers are like.
The only difference you will notice is off-peak hours Dornogal or whatever major city appears dead, not jam-packed, because shards don’t affect major cities or something.
Cross-realm queues are just that, though. Just the same as wotlk, except deader because that was 12M subs, now we’re lucky to have 2M.
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If you play solo, probably not that much, especially now that we have Follower Dungeons, Delves that give us access to the Great Vault and Story Mode Raids.
But if you are into group activity, your mileage may vary.
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Solved with Alts, which is what generally happens even on highly populated servers anyway. The actual Work order system hasn’t quite worked out the way I think Blizz was expecting.
Also no longer an issue thanks to Warbands and the Warbank. Just roll a new character on any random high pop server group and buy non-commodities there, stick them in Warbank and profit.
Not to mention on a dead server you can more easily get things done related to rare spawns and solo world content. For everything else there’s sharding and Group Finder. There is really not much benefit to being on a high pop server group any more if you have a few alts you have the time to develop professions on.
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2m subs only? is WoW dying or something?
I did immediately mention solutions straight after 
A dead server is still connected to other servers. So it’s fine. No different to being on any server. My guys still sit on the character menu alongside their friends from the main universe.
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no one will buy your stuff,
turalyon isnt. its one of the four that NEVER got a server connection. and NO the entire ah is NOT region wide.
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For real? That sucks. I should make a character there. I’m curious to see this ghost town.
Why don’t they just connect those four?
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horde side has around 1-1.3k players. wahteveryou do dont go alliance. its around 500.
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just a mere 500 players? how do they even play this game?
Yeah, Turalyon is in a rough spot. Thankfully I have a friend who crafts, but I also have a few alts on a couple of high pop servers like Stormrage and Area 52 if I need to buy something. If I need gold there, I can just toss it into my Warbank and my other characters can snag it as needed.
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In Memory of Ravenholdt!
Anyone claiming a particular player number right now is pulling that number out of their rear end.
Sure, there are ways for outside sources to guess at it, but the reality is that unless Blizzard suddenly decides that they want to start publishing sub numbers again, then all we have is wild speculation. I’ve heard as low as 1M players, and I’ve heard as high as 7.5M now that the game has relaunched in China.
Honestly, there’s more than enough players to keep WoW afloat for a long time. Blizzard’s problem is they opened too many damn servers in some regions when the game was growing at an unprecedented rate. They also had to do it as the tech at the time didn’t allow nearly as many players on a single server as a modern WoW server can hold. As a result, many of those servers that constantly read as “low” population potentially have MORE players than a medium or high population server would have had in 2004.
Realistically? While I can’t speak for other regions, I honestly think they COULD cut 10-20% of the servers without a massive effect on the playerbase other than the initial migration. Unfortunately, I think they are in between a rock and a hard place on that front. If they start closing down servers, the stockholders that don’t know a damn thing about the game and how it operates will freak out and panic, and the doomsayers have have spent 20 years waiting for WoW to die will take it as the sign that the end is near. Even if excess servers ARE costing them money, I believe the panic from a move to trim the fat will actually hurt them more.
There’s also the fact that the market is very different from the first five years of WoW. That 12M peak is likely far more spread out now as the MMO market is way more saturated now than it was 15-20 years ago. Everyone has a piece of the pie, and I would be shocked if anyone eclipses 10M active players in an MMO ever again, especially as the gaming tastes of Gen Z are VERY different for lack of a better/nicer term.
WoW is fine. Folks keep forgetting that an MMO publisher would have signed a contract with the devil in blood if they could hit even 1M players and make a profit for ten years, much less twenty.
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The economy. However this can now be completely overcome by having alts on big servers.
Social activities if that is your thing such as guilds can be challenging.
i can’t agree more. i think WoW isn’t dying and this game is still going strong