Luminara

Group dynamics in social environments.

People are social animals. The default behavior of most humans it to group together, even in virtual environments. Very old instinctual safety response. The more people in your group, the smaller the chance that you would be the one eaten when a predator attacked.

So the larger the group, the more attractive it is to most people. Servers with heavy populations therefore attract more people by default, because of the herding instinct.

Some people shun socialization, even in virtual environments. This may be due the brain's logic center overriding the more basic instincts, telling the person that he/she is better off alone than with a group, for logical reasons (groups move more slowly, groups leave more easily detected trails for predators, groups involve more communal work for less individual reward, etc.). These people will tend to seek out servers with smaller populations, where they can avoid becoming part of a group.

Some people need more close knit socialization than large groups provide. I can't theorize on the reasoning behind that, due to my mental disorders. But I would expect that these people would play on lower population servers, but specifically seek to join established and relatively stable communities within those "smaller" servers, provided that they are not "ZOMG TOP NUMBAR ON SG" groups. These people want extended virtual families and dear friends, not fame/glory/to be part of something larger.

In regards to the specific server populations, it's similar to a hunter-gatherer social network. If one tribe has a larger population, it will inevitably be more desirable to loners and members of other tribes because it represents easier access to resources and increased safety, whereas other tribes will shift in population, some remaining relatively stable, some growing slowly and some gradually diminishing to nothing, and there will always be the lone wanderers, merchants and traders who travel from tribe to tribe or avoid the tribes altogether.

One additional factor is that each server has a niche, or a reputation for being special in some way, such as Virtue being "the RP server" or Pinnacle being "the drunk server". Players will seek out one or more of these niches in addition to, and sometimes to the exclusion of, population. Players join lower population servers specifically because they would rather immerse themselves in a more specialized aspect or approach to the game, despite having a lower than maximum population.

Basically, it's the same reason some people live in New York, New York and some live in Umatilla, Florida-- because that's just how people are.

Spotted some other critters doing the crab, but none doing it at 92mph, and never more than one or two in a spawn of 5+. Haven't seen any patrols doing it, either. Looks like it's just flavor animation, like Freakshow throwing rocks or CoT meditating and reading. I'm all for more flavor.