My read into what happened, I found it very enjoyable, is: anyone playing for fame/leaderboard naturally wanted to be where the fastest gameplay was happening, so as night fell local time on [c]EUE and [c]EUW and populations dwindled, active players relocated to [c]USE/W where it was still busy.
Because the turnaround speed of events/realm closing was good on [c]USW, once people tasted it, they didn’t want to go elsewhere; so we saw the typical fame train thing of 40+ people queuing (who could’ve gone to the empty 2nd realm) preferring to wait and then flood the realm up to 90+/50 when it opened. Then on Day 2, because the fame-ers never went back to their regular server, no viable realms ever got going elsewhere, and anyone logging on also joined the crowd on [c]USW.
Honourable mention to [c]USS which had a 25/50 or higher realm going throughout, albeit looked like mostly 0/8s.
Even server-hopping looking for closing realms wasn’t very viable, because you’d be (possibly) going somewhere with no inc, or a smaller & less maxed group, so was better to stick with a guaranteed group.
Objectively, it wasn’t any harder to do the new WC, it was always cleared, and the new corridors lent themselves to dragging and over-the-wall tactics very nicely, once it was clear that it was the same O2 only in a new map. The difficulty came from low/no pet, and being 0/8, and the overall difficulty of some phases (sun/dance) which are impossible for unmaxed non-range.
So, alas, yes, if you only wanted a quick O2 mark, the only option was to herd into the full realm. And true, due to out of wack HP Scaling, many players find it tedious to play solo or in small groups for a many-times-longer fight, & more risk, but same reward, vs piling in as part of a big crowd. Future changes sound like they’re going to try and address this with lower base HP, I believe.
