How many people really did any amount of research when it came time to pick their realm?
I mean, I pretty much picked my favorite letter and then whatever had the right acronym beside it.
I didn’t have any real life friends that I had to worry about when it came time to choose server, so I figured it wouldn’t really matter. All servers were more or less the same—it was still the same game, after all.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, the realm that you choose can have a huge effect on how much you enjoy the game.
Different servers came into existence at different points in WoW’s history, so of course they have very different userbases and “cultures”. Some servers are very young while others are as old as Azeroth itself.
Of course, you haven’t been playing that long, and there’s no logical way for you to know that off the top of your head. That’s why we’re going to do a little bit of research before throwing our lot in with a realm.
Choose Your Poison
You should roll PvP, or some variant of PvP.
I know, that’s being racist against all the PvE players, but seriously. It’s called World of Warcraft, isn’t it?
It’s not supposed to be a peaceful community. Sure, you’ll get ganked occasionally, but you’ll pay it back later. It’s really not that bad, I swear, and that’s coming from a girl who hadn’t even touched a MMORPG before WoW.
High Population vs Low Population
Most of the time, high population servers are older servers. They are great for playing the Auction House (or merchanting in general) since there’s a lot of people with a lot of money wanting a lot of items at pretty much every hour of the day and night.
On the flipside, competition can be pretty fierce and inflation can soar on these servers. If you’re into the Auction House, there’s usually a small group of extremely rich (millionaire) players who control most of the items.
If you roll PvP, there’s gonna be a lot more people surfing for easy meat than on a low population server. Chances are, if you don’t already belong to an epic guilde, they’re going to find it. And mince it.
Low population servers yield an Auction House with lower inflation that is easier for you to control, but they also lack buyers. Players don’t want to spend as much money and tend to farm things for themselves instead of outright buying items.
Also, you will often have more of an issue on small servers trying to find people to party with which can be frustrating as a low level toon. Once you hit the latter levels, you may also have a difficult time finding end-game guilds.
Dig Up the Garbage
The last thing you want to do before picking a server is look up and see what type of dirt has been flung around on their forums. No one likes the drama llamas, but it’s especially bad when you have it smeared all over your community.
It’s easy to be drawn into the fighting, and once you are, there’s no going back. Always check out the top few guilds of a server and see what type of picture they paint. If it smells funky, it’s time to look the other way.