I'll tell ya why population is lower.
Anybody with 70 iq or above can understand.
Everything else being equal, PvP massively slows down progression on the red server. Like it or not, progression is the bread and butter of RPGs. PvPers like to talk smack and pretend they're in an alternate universe. But they're not. Players come here to this red server and find that they're getting their a** handed to them by others and their experience bar keeps going backwards. They note that they level up faster on blue and ask themselves WTF are they wasting their time on this red server for if not for some sort of reward? Where is the risk AND reward if the red server is too heavily leaning towards risk? It's out of balance.
The "risks" on this pvp server (everything else being equal):
1) You die in pvp and lose experience
2) You get killed by other players; not just NPCs
3) You're anon and others cannot see your level/class; to protect yourself
4) More often than not, you do not group with other guilds; again, to protect yourself
The rewards:
1) In theory, PvPers feel PvP is the only reward they need
The problem is that PvPers cannot survive solely on killing other players. Furthermore, a lot of players join pvp-servers with PvE in mind. In fact, industry-wide, most players are PvE, not PvP.
Boost the reward and it will get better. Must compensate for increased risk.
Just imagine that the red server is a much more difficult zone than the normal blue zones. The creatures inside are as smart as humans and even grief. To compensate for the increased difficulty, the developers increase the reward by upping the experience rate or some other progression-related variable (like named spawn rate).
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