No matter what you can offer to the community if you won't pay for advert, very few will join and even fewer will stay. Basicly whatever you do ppl will leave, if it's easy server dies in the first week, if you make it too hard, cryers will leave in a matter of hours. So best you can do is to optimize the server for medium difficulty and introduce new content in future updates, but this will work only if you have a certain fan base which will follow up. SweeTs is right, most ppl won't even bother to waste their time and try something new,but you can't expect 100-200 on only from an mxc topic.