Seriously, can someone PLEASE explain to me why it is that, in the last week of my return, not one single person has been in any of the PvP zones?  I know they were never really flooded all the time (on my server, usually only up to 10 on each side at a given time)...but they always had SOME activity.

  Why has everyone left them?  They were part of the best times I've had in the game.  I'd really like to enjoy it again.

thats one problem i had on freedom server. i was in the lvl 20 pvp zone and found where maybe about 10 people were.....they were all on a big roof top dueling...yes dueling..... i was like WTF this is an open pvp zone and what few people there were, decided that it would be safer to duel??? so i decided this is not a pvp game what so ever. i enjoy the pve and thats what i play this game for.

What about the Arena?  I have been away from this game for over 3 years and dont remember the PVP zones back then.   I did go into PVP and did see a couple others there actually chasing me on one occasion and the other i kept my distance because im low level.    Your right it would be cool if PVP was more poplulated.  they need to merge servers  to cause more poplulation.  Why the hell have 8 or more servers all on light load?  all but 2 of them never get past light poplulation.  They need a kick in the ass to pay attention to the game again.  for it being so old and having so many players they are idiots for ignoring.

There's 2 possible reasons that I can think off:

1) You play on a low population server, where nearly everyone that pvp'ed has transferred their pvp toons to Freedom (or one of the other servers with somewhat active zone pvp).

2) I13 really was the nail in the coffin for CoX' pvp. I have no way to check this myself since I'm no longer playing because I13 killed pvp for me.

In case you're wondering what I13 was to pvp, I'll quote myself:

"With I13 NCsoft has done their own personal mini-NGE (see Star Wars Galaxies) when trying to "fix" CoX pvp. The game mechanics were completely changed (for pvp only) by replacing the old unbalanced system with an entirely new unbalanced (+severely broken) system.

In the proceedings the red names managed to tell their existing pvp crowd that they were meaningless and that they didn't want them around anyways. At the same time Ex Libris attempted to put the blame for the fact that obviously broken (or just severely unbalanced) gameplay elements made it onto live on the naughty pvp'ers that were running amock on the closed beta boards. It's not like NCsoft could have suspended those players' access to those closed boards, or that most of those broken gameplay elements were actually already reported on those very same closed beta boards by many people out of that same naughty pvp crowd.

Why the devs would want pvp to have different pvp mechanics than pve is beyond me as well, if I wanted to go play a different game, I already could do just that.

That said, my personal number 1 change has to be that with I13 the devs tried to reinvent the pvp game mechanics and failed miserably."

I guess it's because the old crowd is still in boycott mode and the new crowd hasn't discovered it yet. In time we'll probably see more people again.