How to choose a new starting realm?

[Dvorjak]

Is there other data I should be considering other than population/time zone/faction/pve vs pvp?

I want to start playing again after a 2 years break. I plan on playing as Alliance on a PvP realm. How should I go about picking a realm?

[Deleted]

EU? Ravencrest or Outland. That's about it.

edit: Jk saw your sig after i posted, discard

[ablib]

How do you have a 491 ilvl if you haven't played in 2 years?

[KCguy]

How do you have a 491 ilvl if you haven't played in 2 years?

That's what I thought as well. Figuring this isn't his MMO-C account, but a friends or family members or something. Either that or he's stretching the truth and he's busted! lol

[Dvorjak]

That's what I thought as well. Figuring this isn't his MMO-C account, but a friends or family members or something. Either that or he's stretching the truth and he's busted! lol

gf played my account for awhile.

[Blitzdoctor]

EU? Ravencrest or Outland. That's about it.

EU Outland has people complaining about queues for a while now. You don't want to send people there.

[Deleted]

Population + balance + check wowprogress, usually an active server = many guilds that managed to kill some current bosses. I usually make a new alt on the realm, go to a capital city, browse the AH, check out trade (to see how many guilds are recruting, how many pugs are being done and how active it is in general). I don't do much pvp, so can't give you any good advice here, but asking in trade usually worked well for me, even on cesspit servers like BL you will get some useful answers if you ask in trade (I imagine you'd need to ask about wPVP, pvp guilds recruiting etc).

Btw keep in mind that the top realms EU suffer from long queues, Draenor for example makes you wait 60 minutes + during busy times, I can only imagine it's even worse on Outland or on Silvermoon.

[Deleted]

Also don't look at alliance:horde ratio, many servers with the lesser faction are actually more competitive(especially since you want to do PvP).

[Felarion]

If you are from europe i think good choice will be.

Silvermoon (if you are going to play alliance, it's pve realm with full population nearly 100% alliance)
Draenor (same as silvermoon, just horde version)
Outland or Stormscale (great pvp realms, as far as i knwo there are more alliance on outland idk about stromscale)
I heard alot of good things about Kazzak,Frostmane and Ravencrest aswell.

[Fus Ro Yay]

Play dragonmaw EU.

join us! JOIN US!

[Rixis]

No, don't send him to Draenor, we have 90 minute queues as it is.

[Dvorjak]

Also don't look at alliance:horde ratio, many servers with the lesser faction are actually more competitive(especially since you want to do PvP).

Good advice....but how can I determine which realm has high active World PvP?

Also, I should have stated at the start that I am US.

[Lochton]

Economy, that is a very good thing to consider.

I normally tend to stick to servers where I know people, but would say, look for population, economy, type and how the community is looking like in the area you wish (raiding or PvP)

[kansas311]

US Alli PVP servers are Darkspear, KT, and Tich

If you want more info go look on Wow-progress or something for faction numbers, time zone, population, ect.

There are no realms with high active world PvP, its dead. World PvP is now ganking lowbies in outland ect. Zones are now merged over many servers so there's always levelers to gank, or groups of 3-5 camping cities out there.

[Chain Chungus]

Avoid the Chicago data center.

[Dvorjak]

Economy, that is a very good thing to consider.

I normally tend to stick to servers where I know people, but would say, look for population, economy, type and how the community is looking like in the area you wish (raiding or PvP)

How can I tell which servers have the best economy?

[Thallidomaniac]

Also don't look at alliance:horde ratio, many servers with the lesser faction are actually more competitive(especially since you want to do PvP).

However, there are extremely unbalanced realms that have 0 SoO kills on one faction, i.e. Kel'Thuzad-US Horde. So unless you plan on LFR/Flex as your endgame(not sure if Flex is possible on those realms), then you have to keep that into account.

[RicardoZ]

The realm you choose really means nothing anymore. I used to play on a Latin server and we had GREAT server community. It was probably as close as you could imagine to having "Vanilla WoW back again", because of the language barrier people tend to shun LFR, LFD, etc. and like to group up and do instances the "old fashioned" way. There was world PvP at all levels, everybody knew everybody (and everybody's alts), it really was like a big family. Even through the end of Wrath and Cataclysm all the stuff people were complaining about their servers "dying" we laughed at.

Then came CRZ...

And now with the idea of "virtual realms", it will matter even less. Just choose one with a cool name and be done with it.

[Deleted]

How can I tell which servers have the best economy?

Take a moment to check the prices for basic commodities, i.e. current tier mats (herbs, ghost iron ore, leather, ench dust), weapon enchants, consumables (pots, flasks) and gems. Dead/low pop realms have very little supply and slow turnover, so prices tend to be ridiculous (like, 8k for a simple weapon enchant ridiculous). There are also supply issues (no BoE items, no raid drops, e.g. spirits, only a handful of pets). Generally if you see lots of stuff with decent prices and fast turnover it means the economy is alive, if there's just a few overpriced items nobody buys - it's stagnant. After comparing a low pop realm and a high pop realm you will see the difference very very clearly at a glance.

[Dvorjak]

I am thinking of heading over to the Emerald Dream PvP RP realm. High population with a near 1:1 ratio of Horde vs Alliance. What do you guys think?