need help picking WoW realm

[chinkee]

i'd like to play on an east coast server that is PVE. i'm also looking for a realm that has relatively even number of horde to alliance ratio. the one i tried last night turned out to be a west coast server and i was lagging very badly the entire time. i've also heard that in some servers, the alliance outnumber the horde 5:1. if anyone knows of a medium population east coast server w/ a better horde/alliance ratio, please let me know.

 

[Weeeman]

Originally posted by: chinkee
i'd like to play on an east coast server that is PVE. i'm also looking for a realm that has relatively even number of horde to alliance ratio. the one i tried last night turned out to be a west coast server and i was lagging very badly the entire time. i've also heard that in some servers, the alliance outnumber the horde 5:1. if anyone knows of a medium population east coast server w/ a better horde/alliance ratio, please let me know.

Unless blizzard lied.. all the servers are located in the same area so it shouldn't matter what timezone it is supposed to be. Lag will be lag, moreso on more populated servers.

As for finding one with a good ratio.. thats pretty hard to tell.
I suggest downloading "Cosmos" from the UI section on worldofwarcraft.com and then finding the census addon. Pick a server you like, make an alliance character during prime time, run census. Delete alliance character, do the same thing with horde. [Why can't blizzard just let us know? It'd be a bit easier..]

 

[BlamoHammer]

Go PvP. Sure it's annoying when you get ganked by a group of 5 high level alliance, but it adds such a different element to the gae that I love no matter how many corpse runs I make.

 

[Mellman]

yeah i'd have to agree with the PVP comment...I mean, early levels you won't get ganked...you'll have enough time to learn how to handle yourself, and as far as being laggy...I play on a "west coast server" but live on the east coast and around 7 - 8 PM EST it gets laggy as hell, it sucks, yes it does especially since I work now (will start school again in a week) so we'll see how things go then.

 

[HardcoreRobot]

what does the horde/alliance ratio matter if you arent doing pvp? seriously man do pvp, it adds another whole dimension to the game.

someone posted a list of the ratios on each server a while ago, i will try to find it for ya

 

[LeetViet]

Anyone want to tell me the difference between PvP and PvE? Eitherway, you are required to be flagged for PvP to attack. >_>

 

[Weeeman]

Originally posted by: LeetViet
Anyone want to tell me the difference between PvP and PvE? Eitherway, you are required to be flagged for PvP to attack. >_>

PvP - If you are in your OWN zone [IE You are a human, in an alliance zone] You CANNOT be attacked unless you attack first.

In contested torretories [sp?] anything goes.

Unsure on the PvE rules.

 

[BlamoHammer]

PvP basically means that if you are not in a zone controlled by your faction...you are open game. In PvE from what I have heard, you can be attacked if you lag yourself /pvp and you can attack others who are flagged /pvp but I am unsure.

My only remaining advice is this. Playing PvP means you will get ganked. Higher level players will kill you just because. They will purposely wait until you are fighitng a mob and at half health to guarantee your death. You will be attacked by 5 other players when you are all by your lonesome. Sometimes you will wonder why the hell you decided to open yourself to this torment.

But when you, and 10 other players decide that it's time to shut and Alliance players out of Astranaar (one of their outposts) for the next hour or so and anyonewho attempts to enter receives the penalty of death, you will remember why you chose a PvP server.

 

[Velk]

Originally posted by: Weeeman

Originally posted by: chinkee
i'd like to play on an east coast server that is PVE. i'm also looking for a realm that has relatively even number of horde to alliance ratio. the one i tried last night turned out to be a west coast server and i was lagging very badly the entire time. i've also heard that in some servers, the alliance outnumber the horde 5:1. if anyone knows of a medium population east coast server w/ a better horde/alliance ratio, please let me know.

Unless blizzard lied.. all the servers are located in the same area so it shouldn't matter what timezone it is supposed to be. Lag will be lag, moreso on more populated servers.

They didn't lie directly, but what they said may have been a bit misleading. They made the statement that you could pick any realm and the performance should be equivalent. You interpreted this as meaning that all the servers are in one place, which is certainly not the case - each region has it's own datacenter.

The reason performance is equivalent is that all of them are so overloaded that the latency from east->west coast for example is insignificant.

You can trivially verify this for yourself, by alt-tabbing when logged on to a realm, doing a netstat to obtain the realm IP, and then tracerouting it, then repeating this for realms in other regions.

 

[quikah]

I honestly don't see much point to a PvP server right now since there are no rewards inplace yet for PvP. The only PvP stuff I am really interested in is the battlegrounds which is going to be on all servers so I just play on a PvE server. PvE does not mean there are no PvP battles. There is usually a raid going on against the Crossroads on my server (Malygos) at least 4 or 5 times a week (120+ alliance raid this past weekend which lagged eveyone out, became playable once the numbers got down to around 60 on each side) so there is plenty of PvP action for me, I just won't ever get ganked when I am trying to finish a quest.

If you want to get some ideas on server populations you can check wowcensus.com for estimates. And really, I play on a Central server from California and get latency of 200-300 ms and have no major lag problems (occasional spike).