New servers get around 50-100 people or so from my experience for the first 4 or so months. Then it'll drop to below 50 after that. My server before a merge dropped to below 20 and only 1 group for GNW after about 6 months. Then 2 months later we got a server merge or so. But the reasons servers seem dead is cause there is a lot of players spread out across servers and there are players who jump from server to server all the time. If you want competition join one of the oldest servers. Yeah you'll be behind. But if you play intelligently you can catch up pretty quick decently. So even if you join a new server, * with it even if it is dead. Cause you will get a server merge eventually and you have X-Server Arenas if that matters.

On my Main Server I'm 71k at level 94. While on S2 I'm 30k at 69.