After main devs decided to stop development I raised a casual CoW server but it was empty for weeks so I turned it off.
From this and past experiences with CoW events I can say people gathered around this mod only act as if they are interested, while showing very little interest when it comes to actually playing the mod, so just don't waste your time and energy on this.
but why don't people play it? Why do they play mods like NaS or any other mods, but not this one? While reading older posts, people were hyped and wanted to play this mod so badly. Now no one cares. I don't understand why people lost interest
Probably many little factors. I think one of reasons is visual identity of CoW is not attractive enough, it is mostly dull gray/brown colors as opposed to NW's various vivid colors of uniforms and this produces boredom in most people. I like CoW period armor pieces very much, but in M&B engine, if not done by a very professional modeler, uniforms just don't look too well. And model quality doesn't appeal to people who got spoiled by NW and NaS, this is problem many mods have nowadays.
Also, melee is done in a way which requires good teamwork, and you can die easily without it being your fault (more so than NW, due to those long but spammy pikes) so this deters some people. And, the period itself is simply not as popular as NW or NaS, which also has strong base of American players, due to NaS being strictly related to their history. Add to that the fact that many people will say "Deluge is a better version of this" and I guess you have enough cons to burry the mod.
Those are just my guesses tho, I'm not sure what actually caused this difference between pretended interest VS actual interest.