Return to Azeroth

I started playing WoW again Tuesday. They started up some new servers, so I rolled up some characters on Duskwood. There's something nice about starting fresh on a new server, and something painful too. I tried to start new characters on other EQ servers before -- restarting the level grind again was just too painful. WoW level grinding is a bit different, though nothing new -- when we were internally testing WoW in alpha, level wipes and character wipes were commonplace, so every couple of months we'd start fresh from level 1 again, and we'd have to run through the newbie zones and new quests all over again.
The new server went up on Monday afternoon. I started my characters on Tuesday night. My characters are level 17 now. The highest levels are twice that, level 33/36 etc. I find that it's important to get past the curve in the initial week or so is vital for being able to speed level, that being said, I've smack in the middle of the curve right now, being 12 hours behind, and actually doing things other than playing 24/7 (There's at least 4 or 5 who have done that -- their characters are in the 30s). I was tempted to grind straight through to at least 20, since I know I can do it in a day. The game is harder earlier on without high levels running around, it's almost like a natural ecology, where the zones are so packed, n00bs starve themselves out of experience because the monsters don't spawn fast enough, and the equipment most are using is little better than the quest rewards and the occassional random drop. Some are still running around in tattered clothing.
The zones that I've been fighting in are definitely on the edge of the curve -- the players are still poorly equipped, but there's plenty of resources to plunder and monsters to kill. Every moment away from the game is knowing that the masses will soon catch up behind me (and may starve me out of experience as well). I can always just wait for the masses to move on, also -- in a week, they've all gotten past my point, and I can return to the low populated zones to grind for xp.
The World of Warcraft manages to sustain itself by miracle of server automated repopulation, but I'd love to see what the death rates are in a zone that the newbies are moving through in the form of a realtime map. The newbies would just be a wave that washes over the zones.