Well there is the flock sheep syndrome as well
. Danzig is one of the best maps in RO, especially to get a quick fix of RO. Meaning its easier to get filled up, and people prefer to join servers with people on it so even the Danzig haters will join Danzig as its Danzig or nothing for them. But people that would like play some of the other great maps from time to time are nearly forced to join European servers.
At some point people will join a server regardless on whether its what they prefer or whatever. But purely because they know it will fill up. But that only gets to be an issue in the ending game of a game. And a small community coming together getting fed up with a single server can change whatever server is the most popular one.
Back in the mod for instance DBDUK had the most popular European server, and Cor/Cia had the most popular American server.
DBDUK had a server mutator so that the player with the highest score in that server would get kicked out when a DBDUK player joined. Next to that players with a clan tag were often randomly kicked if DBDUK members lost a round or were killed by them.
Next to that as a big chunk of the DBDUK members at some point left DBDUK and formed Core in order to play games against other clans instead of only play on public servers. DBDUK kicked all Core members off the server by default.
As a result a small group of the community created a different server with more serverslots than DBDUK and created a rule set that made server visitors equal in rights to the actual owners of the server. So that everybody would have the same chance of enjoying the game, as there were only enough players for 1 filled up server.
- Everybody is allowed to express their opinions even against Admins as long as they wouldn't throw out insults.
- No player would ever be kicked under any circumstance to free up a slot for any of the paying members for the server.
- Players were allowed to vote themselves what maps they wanted to play.
- Clans were allowed to recruit on the server as long as they wouldn't spam or annoy any visitors in the server (no need to impose recruiting rules when there is only one server you can play on).
- Regular players were given moderation privileges to keep the team killers out.
- Logging of players guids, player scores and chat information, so accused team killers could be banned with proof of the act even in the rare occasion that no Admin was present during the act.
(initially there was only one server which doubled as a match server but later on with support from the community itself a second server could be rented so the public server could continue running uninterrupted).
The bigger player amounts (32 vs 24) and the support of people that were fed up getting kicked out of the only European server and due to DBDUK enjoying to kick players out. Quickly changed that this server took over to be the most popular and only 24/7 filled up server in the last year of the Red Orchestra mod.