I just wanted to make this topic to shed more light on the fact that on our NA East region, certain servers are way more populated than others. Now of course I would not start calling servers dead however, for example my own server Vykas, lacks any sort of actual competitive players. There are hardly any players at tier 2 in this server and basically none at tier 3 at this point. There isn’t any try hard guilds that you can join to help clear difficult island server events as well as (other types of raid events). All it feels like while playing Vykas is that you’re a solo player getting stronger from the help of other servers. This makes bartering in-game non existent and extremely boring. Events like Ghost Ship at tier 2 wasn’t even possible to do considering very little players showed up and that’s a pretty massive event. Treasure maps which are frequently dropped aren’t even practical as there is often no one to do them with at a higher level and this goes for basically every server event like I said. Even during server selection, there are several none busy servers with casuals who make it so that invested players cannot progress without the help of other servers which simply doesn’t feel good. Unless there is some solution to activity and guilds on dying servers for try hard players. I myself being at tier 3 can’t possibly stay playing this game. Even if we have to pay a fee to transfer one character, it is still worth it IMO and I would do it in a heartbeat.
Imagine that this game is out for two weeks now.
And not every player is rushing to lvl 50 and doing endcontent things to the limit 
I played on EU Central for a while (score ~600) on two server’s, until the queue thing gets out of hand.
So I started playing on EU-W after they opened it. And there are barely people with T2 unless the hardcore players.
I understand your desire for more competitive/progress players. But I guess you should looking for a progress guild that is near your expectations, Instead of talking about rdm players are not rdy to play the content you want to play.
Don’t get me wrong, I played WoW for years on progressive lvl and I can totally see your point. But you can’t do this without a proper guild or group of players