tbh, i have no idea how to tell anymore how healthy my server is. are we better now we are connected with Maelstrom, (and others?). only a handful of players have joined my guild since the merge so cant tell if its fixed the problem of no players to recruit from, BUT another problem has since arisen in that the guild finder tool is broken for us! so we could be connected to draenor and still not get players cause we cant invite them! blizz have basically told us to go away so dont know if this will be fixed, which leaves us at least in almost the same spot.
what server do you mean? do you mean ghostlands? (looking at my numbers from OP).
thats characters, not players. i alone have 20 lvl 50 toons on this server. thats not 20 people, thats just me. and while 3K people sounds like a lot, it obviously isn’t because just look at our server for raid progression. ffs im one of the top players for hk’s STILL, and most of my hk’s came from TBC/WotLK!
i dont know where those 3k are, but 3k out of about 1- 1.5M (eu players) is not a lot. especially when they dont seem to interact with other players. one of the guilds i came across while doing these numbers has nearly a thousand players, but they haven’t even killed a single boss in ANY BfA raid, AND i never see their players around the world.