North American numbers have always been lower than European; couple that with the pandemic "ending," it being summer, and the server being "old" and you're seeing the numbers we should have had a year ago, but got lucky with because everyone was locked inside.
I play at Euro hours, so the decline is not so harsh. For me though, that the server is "old" has somewhat gotten to me. I find it hard to motivate myself to log on these days. Summer is coming, and the lure of daoc is not so strong anymore. It feels a bit stale, and that is obviously not the fault of the devs, but the server is entering the "twilight zone".
The server status should be evaluated after the summer imho. The summer, especially in the southern europen countries, is a serious stuff for vacations, go outside, etc..
I guess what makes it all the more difficult to accept so small a player base, is that no one has done anything close to DAoC. Elder Scrolls Online was just 3 mirrored factions, where race was purely cosmetic. The whole be a vampire/werewolf thing added even more cheese, and the pvp aspect looks terrible.
I had high hopes for Camelot Unchained, but a few years ago even I began to realize it was vaporware, the real goal being to market a new game engine while posing as DAoC 2. The fact they literally just built a pvp game and every video was an open field or the same castle with 10 year old rendering, was just awful.
Anyway, shame no one has the $ or the interest to build a 3-4 faction mmorpg with medieval flavor, and factions that have their own geographical location for questing/grinding to end game, as opposed to forced quest sharing with another faction in order to 'prompt' pvp that in no way supports the faction you are on.
Perhaps in ten years or so, someone will come up with something.
devs get all credit for server but rarely any blame. they spend more time banning and nerfing names than fixing problems.
their events bring in so much action, yet receive such little support its confusing. have you ever seen any dev interact with people during an event other than threaten to ban people for hiding in chimneys? Set anything unique up? There's not 6 million active subs playing this game, there's a couple thousand people. This weird faux professional setting gimmick can go.