My shard would have robust participation in this event right now if they had not made the drop rate (lack of spawns, poor respawn time, whatever) so low & the constant changes have not helped confidence in the event. Also, Destard imo is a horrible dungeon for this type of event (too small, way too open). Complicating it severely are what I call the death breath paragons. When we had the town invasions at the start of the pandemic, Britain was always the worst and most hated due to these mobs. Even though they were not flagged as paragons, they were considerably harder than normal versions. Until this event, my shard always has had robust participation with many people in the off hours even.
I am not here to debate shard bound. That has been argued over constantly. But the following is what happened at the start of this event on my shard and for roughly the first two weeks. In the first (First spawn cycle) 2-3 days of this event, we were flooded with players from other shards farming drops and selling them day and night in chat for cheap. 75% of these players I have never seen before in my very long history on the shard. A vendor house was set up next to the dungeon. On top were 6 mannequins with full "of fey wrath" bone suites. Even this event, bone helms are still rather rare so its suspicious how 6 full suits were up only 1.5 days into the event. I personally saw guilds popup with tags like "Atlantic Farm Guild", etc coming in and out of the house maintaining the vendors. This was the time of the "pile". Then after the pile was done away with (spawn cycle #2), the prices went up and the "archer pit" was set up. There were half a dozen sets of accounts with 3-5 characters per set, each set clearly run by the same person. Everything died almost instantly. No paragon was safe. Most of us who wanted drops adapted and dusted off our archers and spawn AI'd everything as fast as we could to try to keep up with these players. Still do not recognize 75% of them. Then the third spawn cycle (the current one) was implemented. All the multi-boxing accounts except one disappeared. A 3 gargoyle thrower team was roaming the north section trying to find new farm ground. That did not last long. Maybe 3 hrs. They are gone also. Now the only thing left are 6-8 single players at any given time in the dungeon.
From other shards smaller than ours, I hear similar stories. This event clearly shows to what lengths people will go to in order to take advantage of a poorly thought out event & to game the system. The early off-shard farmers got around the whole "shard bound" thing to profit when it was easy. Now they are back on their home shards with who knows how much of our servers gold. People will always find some way in mmo's to profit in ways that the devs never intended. But this event clearly shows how short sighted our devs really are. They created the atmosphere in which players quickly found ways to overwhelmingly turn it to their advantage.