Hello I have just joined WoW and I’m on a new player realm however it seems a bit sparse. I was wondering if I can change to a more populated realm and how can I do that please? Also, as a new player I am totally restricted on so much gameplay so how can I decide if I want to pay for a game I can’t fully test out yet? Is there a way to earn or get free game time before I decide? Thank you 
Welcome to Azeroth!
Yes, realm choice is a REALLY important decision, that new players don’t even know they have to make, and so often choose badly.
Let’s see how far I can boil down a very complicated subject.
- Alliance and Horde factions are very unbalanced. Horde dominates overall at the moment, something like 3:2 in population and 80:20 in terms of activity, I would guess.
- On an individual realm, usually either Alliance or Horde will dominate.
- Opposite faction players on your realm do you no good at all. You therefore want to be on a realm where your faction is in an overwhelming majority.
- Most people also want to be on a very big realm, where there is a lot of activity for guilds and groups, and a lot of trade so you can buy and sell things efficiently.
So the optimum choice is to choose a huge realm where your faction completely owns the place.
There are some mitigating and complicating factors.
- Some realms are designated for Role Play. Those will contain many (not all) people who Role Play out the stories of their characters. If this is for you, it may override all other considerations.
- Some realms, while officially English-speaking, have been unofficially colonised by people who speak other languages, making it difficult for English speakers.
- On the very largest realms, there is a chance of lag and queues for a few weeks at the start of each expansion. There is also a lot of spam in Trade Chat.
For the general case, I can recommend Draenor for Horde, and Silvermoon or Ravencrest for Alliance. You can get a sense of the general relative sizes of realms here: https://www.wowprogress.com/realms/rank/eu/lang.en
To move a character from one realm to another, you have to pay real money. 25 Euro. It’s a lot, and definitely not worth paying for a Level 10 character. https://eu.shop.battle.net/en-us/product/world-of-warcraft-service-character-transfer
However, you can have up to 50 characters at a time, so the simple answer is for you to make a new character on the realm you prefer.
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Testing the gameplay is a more complicated question.
Before you add any gametime, you can make as many as 50 characters up to Level 20, try them out, see the whole world - except for the most recent expansion Shadowlands - by talking to Chromie outsie Stormwind Embassy. That gives you a lot of information, and there are potentially hiundreds of hours of free play just in that. I honestly think it’s a great offer for a game to provide.
When you add gametime, you can level your characters up to Level 50, but still not see Shadowlands.
When you have gametime and buy Shadowlands, you can get stuck into the endgame of WoW at level 60, which is where nearly everybody is playing at the moment.
There is no free offer to try out a Level 60 character.
It may be that you can create a Public Test realm account. I think those are given only to people with current game time, but I’m not sure. No harm in looking to see whether you can get in, though: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/how-to-get-into-the-ptr/329452
If you do, you can get a Level 60 character there. However, you will not have learned much about the game, and specifically about Shadowlands systems, because you haven’t played it, and you will likely be roadkill for any wandering mobs, so be prepared for a frustrating time.
For general information about WoW, the story, and how it is played, these sites are essential:
and this video is very long but covers everything expect Chromie Time, and is broken into short chapters
And in general, you can find out anything you can think of about WoW on YouTube.
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If you want to play alliance, make a char on ravencrest. Feel free to msg me ingame if you need some help (bags etc). Happy to help you. See you ingame soon!
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Thank you for your replies. I think I will start another character on a better realm, I’m just disappointed that the features that help make an MMO sociable are denied to trial players such as Guilds, Mailbox etc.
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If they didn’t restrict it no one would pay.
I just wanted to ask about this. Last night, some friends and I went to Korthia with war mode on to… er, take part in some perfectly fair and equitable open world PvP. (We don’t usually do that kind of thing, but we’ve been getting into arena lately, and there’s a nice trinket reward for killing 20 players in Korthia.) The difficulty we had was that there were practically no Horde in Korthia. Not many Alliance either, but definitely more than Horde.
My understanding of how war mode works is that, when you activate it, you’re removed from your realm’s PvE population and ‘sharded’ with other players, from multiple realms, so there should be people to play with and, more importantly, against. One of my friends said I was wrong, and we were actually in the war mode population of the group leader’s realm. Since that’s a low pop realm, we regrouped with me as lead (even though I pointed out that Ravencrest is Alliance-heavy and I hardly ever see Horde in Korthia), and then with another member from Argent Dawn as lead. We didn’t find enough Horde to get our 20 kills and eventually gave up and went to bed.
What did we do wrong? I mean, I know Korthia can be a bit quiet sometimes now, but not totally deserted.
Sorry, I don’t know, at least not now.
When coalescences (shards) were introduced some if us did experiments to figure out what realms, what populations, and so on, and I had a fairly clear idea. But they’ve changed the parameters, I presume to improve the results, many times since then.
The last time I turned WM on was for some of the Kill 20 events in Nazjatar, and that was only brief, so I am in no position to guess at the current algorithm.
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