What does it really mean? I know the basics “low population” means not many people “high pop” means lots of peeps but is it a bad idea to join a realm that has high pop? Does it mean fighting over everything so you can complete your quests. Does it mean the AH is cheaper or more expensive? What about those with the population that says “New Players”? Are those low pop or what. There are some realms that are linked with anywhere from 2 - 6 different realms tied together. Are those bad to try on?
I’ve never PvPd so I’m not looking for that. I just want to do my quests and some dungeons. Maybe I’ll break down and try a BG. I REALLY love the DH so I would actually need realms that can interact/mail stuff between them. What exactly does “New Players” population mean? New accounts only? Low pop?
A lot comes down to personal choice. Take Tichondius for example. They are a PvP realm and during peak hours you may have to spam something 3 times in general chat for someone to even see it. In comparison you have Borean Shadowsong which I guess now is more of a low pop combined server. Those servers with 5 and 6 combined were at the time they were connected even lower than us. They tried to link realms that were in similar time zones. By the time they got around to us, our option was Central Standard and a West Coast which made for some tough choices for people that wanted to raid or participate with others around the same times at night.
Its fairly easy to roll up a character for any realm and poke your head in for a bit to see how active things are. Making a run from Silvermoon to Ogrimar to check AH prices might take you 15 minutes. Like I said, a lot is personal choice, I prefer our size here because it allowed me to get to know people.
Honestly it varies from server to server. Each one evolves per expansion. When i started hanging around on mg at first it was a medium to low pop server with like 4 raiding guilds. Now it is full pop with log in ques and over a 100 raid teams with 3 being part of the hall of fame guilds. Rp realms have the pleasure of no merging or crz involvment. Questing is still fairly easy and we have an amazing healthy economy. Our sister server stormrage which is also full pop though can be a headache to level on and everything is extremely expensive. Really all determines on how you want your community to be in the end.