Imo, every player who starts playing AL fresh will immediately think its a dead game. Windmoore is mostly empty, Garetta Village is empty and all maps who are not run by endgame players are also empty. They play a MMORPG for the social aspect but they barely get anything from that unless they reach endgame. Now that wouldn’t be a problem if new players would be aware that there is indeed a bigger endgame playerbase, but they probably aren’t aware of that. All they see is empty maps, because all maps that contain a lot of players (Expedition Camp, Festerfang Outpost, Vardan Valley) are locked