Suggestions for helping low-pop servers

[lifehole]

It never really was THIS bad before the 4 servers. When the 3rd server was introduced, the playerbase got spread out. People say it was the introduction of cogmap, but from personal observation it looked like this boosted our population, just in the wrong damn way.

It's all got to do with the mentality. I'd write a post but embolism summed it up nicely last thread

Having four servers actually gives us no choice of server assuming you want to play a proper round.

There's three broad types of SS13 players: those who don't mind chaotic rounds, those who prefer less chaos but actually want to play a round, and those who just want to do their own thing. With four servers, the players who prefer less chaos find themselves too spread out amongst the three lower-pop servers to actually play a proper round, and since they still want to play a round they go to the packed server; leaving the lower-pop servers even emptier. The result is instead of having two choices like we used to have, we now only have one.

tl;dr: Herd mentality.
Have two servers, one american and one european. Leave it up for 2 weeks and if shit doesn't start to patter out, then I will record myself eating half a dozen of eggs.

pretty much this, except have the american server not be a laggy shitfest compared to the eu server. I'm a player that goes in-between not minding and preferring less so previously I would travel in-between 1-2 (or... what was it before? 3-4? 1-4? back when we were named gibbed) and since they both had like 15-40 people it was satisfactory to go to 1 if I wanted to have a chaotic action packed funtime, and go to 2 if I wanted a more slow-paced do your own thing type thing. But now it's either chaotic action packed funtime (at peak hours, anyways. I don't mind the 4 am in the morning 20 people stage) or just completely empty.

I've never even CLICKED or bothered to GO on one of the servers with less than 10 people, because I know I won't have fun or a real round there.

But then the problem arises: if it comes down to how it was previously with low-but playable pop and high-and-chaotic pop BUT one of them is less laggy, I will probably still choose the less laggy one.