Well mate, i think there are many factors while their population went down. All of them worked together. Here is how i look at things. Might be wrong but bare with me. 1. VoA was one of the first places ppl tried for new home after nost died, ppl werent sure they will stay there, but they just gave it a try, many of them left because they wanted to keep playing vanilla, and went to Kronos 2 that released. Some left for Lordaeron even cuz man how ppl love population. 2. Many ppl left due to the lag it had it the beggining due to the population going from 50 to 2000 in 2 days. Server wasnt ready. EU players were like wtf we cant play on NA server it lags, and left. They didnt wait for them to do the changes they did in order to improve EU latency, wich isnt a problem now. 3. Many ppl went on l4g due to it being EU, and more hyped, not caring about that l4g is a 3 year old server that only has success now due to using another server's core. 4. Population brings population and often population makes ppl close their eyes for bugged content, constant dcs and lag, unproffesional staff, like we see on l4g for example....- just saying VoA and l4g are both shitty compared to..a good TBC server. 5. Some ppl left due to very major bugs VoA had, some of wich were fixed altho we see ppl still whining about bugs that are on every tbc server that is there but if its on VoA THEN ITS A BIG DEAL. I had 2 guys that i started with there that left after they saw Blood Furnace (wich is fixed now i think, i stopped when i heard about the PVE realm). 6. Ppl believe reddit shills. 7. Pve realm announcement made many new players quit the pvp realm and wait for it. 8. Rapidly decreasing population making ppl loosing hope and quiting as well.

Honestly..i am so sad that there is reddit. What i can say is..give every server a try..try it, believing reddit is like believing rotten tomatoes review on the warcraft movie. I will give it another try..if i see something i cant handle..il quit and wait for the next server that will dissapoint me.