The population decrease isn't as noticeable during prime hours, but if you play mostly at night I could tell a big difference starting the week of the split. Perhaps a majority of the late night gamers are on primal or crystal. Or maybe they started playing other games that week because it's the end of the expansion. Or maybe they log in, see nothing going on like me, and THEN go play other games... There's a threshold in online games where once the population gets low enough, it plummets. This is a great game, and I'd just hate to see it start dying because of bad decisions like fracturing the player base. I already lost a good portion of my friends because of the server split.