If you wish to read it, here is the story of my experience (a bit long, sorry):
The server I am on had a population that was able to fill invasion rosters with ease and still have more than enough in the standby list to fill another roster. Wars always had 50 vs 50 no matter which colors or territories were fighting while still having a healthy standby list. OPRs were popping. Expedition groups, and elite chest runs had plenty of people available. It was not so overcrowded that you had to deal with massive numbers of farming bots or node spawn campers. The TP always had plenty of sellers, and buyers, it was functioning well and I could always find what I needed for consumables. And all of that was after the last issue of transfer tokens. If tokens had not been issued those players would still be on the server and the population would still be at a healthy level.
The only reason the population took a nose dive was because tokens were issued and suddenly groups of players formed. There was the group that contracted the “grass is greener on the other side” condition, the group that became fearful of being left behind, the group that was pressured by company mates to go with them, the group that was determined to stay on the server, and the group that didn’t know what to do. The first group left, which exacerbated the situation and reinforced the fears of the fearful group and the pressure on the pressured group. That in turn pushed the undecided group into the fearful and pressured groups. In the end they moved to larger servers, with only the determined group remaining on the original server.
Those that moved to the “massive” servers found that now they have to contend with large numbers of farming bots, every orichalcum vein being spawn camped with people even placing their camps on top of the node after they mine it to prevent someone else from mining it in case it spawns while they are AFK or doing some other activity away from the node. The toxicity on those servers is generally much higher than it is on a smaller server as well.
I know because I was in one of the companies that convinced everyone in the company to transfer, they decided where to go, preached the “grass is greener” over there but got to go now before they lock it. It was a larger company, and then other companies were having the same discussion. One company, then another, then it became a landslide of companies leaving. I allowed that pressure to get the better of me and made a hasty decision to use my only token and went with the company I was in. Once I got on the new server, I took a look around, tried to go farm some ore, watched the chat, etc.
It did not take long to realise that the grass was not greener at all, and I regretted my decision. I immediately re-rolled a new character from scratch back on my original server. It still had a population level that could fight wars and fill invasions, but other companies that saw the first ones leave saw it as a doomsday message and they ran too.
Even though I have a character on a much larger server, I now find myself playing almost exclusively on my re-rolled character (now lvl 60) on our little server instead. We still bravely fight the invasions, even with rosters of only 40 players and sometimes even less than that, even lvl 50’s will join in to try to help. More often than not we end up coming out of it beaten and licking our wounds, but with heads held high that we came together and fought anyway. On a few occasions we won, and oh the exuberance and celebrations we enjoyed on those victories!
We rarely have wars, unless it is to try to revitalise a territory with a dead company owning it. We have learned to come together, to work together, helping to run one another’s town boards to repair damage from invasions, etc. Our global chat is surprisingly active, and toxicity is practically non-existent and if it does creep in, it is shut down by the community.
What we need is some more players to welcome to our proud and determined server community where we can all share in victory over an invasion with a celebration that gets the local tavern to start thinking about installing better sound proofing, and the denizens of the saved town out dancing in the streets. Maybe even foster some healthy friendly rivalry with a war every now and then, with GG’s all the way around (even if only over dead territories set aside as the battle zones).
If you made it to the end, thank you for reading it.