All the shards are losing players, even Atlantic. In the last six months or so, the space next to my Atlantic house has been empty and then had a house placed on it 3 or 4 times already. It was empty over the holidays and then someone placed there about 2 days ago. I noticed tonight that it's bare grass again. That tells me that finding a bigger location than that one on Atlantic is getting easier and easier.
I really hope that when we start seeing publishes with the stuff that was on the devs' wish list at the September meeting that we will also see EA provide some good, positive publicity for UO and/or some kind of a campaign to get former players to return.
It seems to me that with an in-game vendor search coming up, currency conversion, champ spawn revamp, player-run councils, some kind of change that allows us to have more co-owners on houses, secondary houses on Siege, not being able to sell duped items on vendors, and all of the server maintenance that is apparently happening, that EA is making some big changes behind the scenes to support all this and I can't see them making that kind of investment of money and time without also planning to do something to get more players back into UO. However, we're also getting close to the end of EA's current fiscal year (March 31st) and I think it's always kind of a scary time in terms of layoffs, budget cutbacks, and project cancellations. Hopefully if all goes well for the team, we'll start seeing some real momentum in April and May again.