Out of interest I’ve been tracking the individual server numbers roughly for the last 3 weeks or so. AGS data would be more accurate and draw better conclusions but:
Early 5 dec - AP was peaking at 5.1k players, sutekh at 2k, Delos at 1056 at 10pm.
10 dec when trading post was disabled - AP peaked at 4.2k.
12 dec - AP peaked at 4.5k, Delos at 1160, Sutekh at 1620, Eridu 430 at 10pm.
13 Dec - AP peaked at 4.7k, Delos at 1044, Sutekh at 1732, Eridu at 463, primordial at 1463 at 10pm.
14 Dec - AP peaked at 4.2k, Delos barely scraped 1k, Sutekh 1597, Eridu 377, primordial 1195.
20 Dec - AP peaked at 4.4k, Delos at 1111, Sutekh at 1771, Eridu 358, primordial 1286.
Conclusions:
dupe/TP closure caused a lot of people to stop playing and not return.
Eridu population peaking at 350 is too low for a healthy population. Best can be said is at least it’s not at the 26 player peak servers like last year. People are either transferring independently to Delos or quitting.
Delos pop peak around 1k - will increase to approx 1.1k if a war between certain companies occurs as Sutekh players will play on Delos for a short time.
Primordial pop is falling faster than legacy player pop since Delos and Eridu now out number it when it initially hit server cap on release and had third fresh start server already merge into it. In early November Delos fell to approx 1.2-1.3k peak after fresh start and bled to about 1k while primordial is at 50% of its previous peak.
Delos and Eridu merge would create a healthy pop server, current set up is 75% of pop is on one server and 25% on another.
Sutekh is most active server on AP and is opposite of EU where legacy worlds are healthy and fresh start worlds are dying.