Interesting think I've seen is there are actually two communities: The old players, who take part in regimental linebattles and are the majority of the users on this forum
Then there's the public community. Most of them don't even know this forum exists and some of them don't even realize or just don't care there are big linebattle events with lines of players because they enjoy playing alone.
I haven't seen a big drop in the number of players in the public servers. In fact, most drops are caused by servers shutting down but there always seem to rise new servers with new interesting rules, like minisiege, that just explode the number of players on public servers for a while.