How do you measure a severs success?

[Thorpa]

Personally I default to population, after all, as this is a MMO-based emulation.

Secondarily I could see "smooth stable and working" as a personal goal for the developer/s. However once you launch and run a server with its individual implementations those goals are met.

I'm mainly posing this question to those servers that have "peaked" and are now ghost towns but the devs never seem to take kindly to suggestions or even an inclination that the server MIGHT be done for.

Personally I've played on almost all of the servers and I know what works long term. I feel if you do anything outside of what would be considered total custom (THF, Shards, EZ) or total Legit (p99, TAKP) you're hoping for a year at best with a 100-200 population for some of that time.