The problem is not of character count. The problem is how welcoming or not the game is.
With the new message system, we will introduce a new global channel to help newbies out. That, for one, should be a big help.
I believe the issue Lorgan raised is more about involvement rather than the learning curve. That is, unless a newcomer is quite lucky it is true that a brand new character will hardly be involved in any of the (likely) several layers of realm activity, since it is not that common to have realm-wide interesting discussion ongoing.
Regardless of how well the newcomer understands the game, if he/she is eager to experience it having only two characters living at the bottom of the feudal hierarchy will likely give him very little news to play with, and might push him to quit thinking "this game is boring". Yes, the pace is declaredly slow, and one can argue that while a newbie is busy figuring out how the game works he might not need that many inputs, but we all know how important is the first impression of a game.
In the end this has much more to do with how a realm is structured and how much the older characters living there try their best to retain newcomers than with game mechanics, but it proved -at least for me- to be quite difficult to motivate newcomers sometimes.
