We can occasionally muster a strong pop for a few hours if we get a happy medium between a map that doesn't suck complete dick and a map that people don't think is commonly "overplayed"
In my limited experience, the server fills up when the map is on a b-tier map, from there like four people will join and usually none of these people are actually playing the game, but 4 people is enough to draw in a few more people, resulting in a population of anywhere from 8-12. At this point, people start to kinda actually play the game, there's enough people that you're not completely wandering around an empty map without seeing anyone else and from here the server starts to retain people since there's actually a reason to stick around.
This is usually eventually lost when someone for some reason absolutely feels it necessary to start a rally to go to one of our abysmal maps. I don't mean bunker or duketown, I mean our maps that are known to commonly cause frame issues or that contain numerous visual glitches. After that, population usually at least halves, and from there people trickle out until nobody is left. Interestingly from what I've seen, this does not happen transitioning to maps that people deem "overplayed", although it seems initially about as hard to populate those maps as the bad ones. My best guess at why this is is that more people willing to put up with them if they've already joined since their game isn't shitting the bed, and likelihood is that the map changes soon anyway.
tldr yeah game dead
