I forget which server I was on in 1.x... but I do remember lobbying to join this one large "hardcore" group that a few of my friends were in, but the leader wouldn't let me in because I couldn't commit to playing X number of days/week.
The irony is that as I continued playing, all the folks in his giant linkshell started losing interest and quitting (my friends in his group kept me updated). As the weeks/months went by, only a handful of them remained... and then the hardcore leader quit.
My friends eventually found homes in other groups.
Eventually, that hardcore guy logged in again... and he actually tried to recruit me to a new linkshell he was starting. I nicely said thanks, but no thanks.
Good times!
My server was never empty though... given the state of the game, I think my world was just as "populated" as any other. But the game's playerbase was just dismal... and even if there were 60k 1.x players who gamed 24 hours/day, that still wouldn't be enough to justify the newly released total "hours played" stat.
It's not that 60k sounds like an unrealistic number (I even recall hearing the game had a playerbase closer to 80k by the time it went offline), but most of those people didn't log a ton of hours. The game wasn't casual-friendly, and in-game communities tended to be small and disjointed because of how many people quit prior to 1.23. There was a lot of anger toward SE over how bad 1.x was; a lot of people refused to come back based on principle alone.
Edited, Aug 25th 2015 10:33am by Thayos