The majority of the division plays HC. We changed half of our servers to HC. Yesterday, we tried starting up Air Maps 4-5 hours and, at most, we got 20 players on it. Granted, it crashed and it's the holidays, but we decided to start up the rush rotation and it took 30 minutes to and hour at most to get it started and it was rocking and rolling for 5 to 6 hours.
We are listening to our members and we will try anything in order to keep our current servers. But it all boils down to the individual member of the division. As harsh as it sounds, the majority of us is guilty of going to a populated/full non-eGO server rather than to try and get ours started. Granted, certain situation and unaccountable events can occur and you can't play, that's fine. Maybe you have only a couple of minutes to play before you have to go to an appointment, that's fine. But when you see players on your friends list play on a non-eGO server for an hour or two while our servers are empty, that's depressing.
Here are some suggestions when you're trying to start a server:
Buddy up in Vent and go for a couple of rounds with pistols and knives on a server. Honestly, it'll take like 6 - 8 people to get a server started (and I mean getting it populated) and going pistols and knives, although challenging, is fun. If a couple of pubs connect to the server, you can ASK them to participate, but the don't have to. Remember: it's against EA's terms of use on ranked servers to restrict weapons and kits, but that does not say that everyone on the server can't unanimously agree to omit certain weapons and transport for a certain amount of time.
Or if you're going to use your computer for something else, you can idle on the servers. We've turned the idle kicker off on all of our BF3 servers, so unless the server crashed, it won't kick you for idleing. If you know you're going to be busy for a bit typing up something, taking a shower, or cooking, you can idle on the server.
Every little bit helps guys. If you're tying to start up and fill a server, you are stepping up and you're helping us keep and, eventually, expand our servers. If we can, let's try and end this year and start hit next year with full servers.