I will talk as a long time player from oldschool L2 from official servers and from private servers. In year 2020 the lineage players are the same, they will never increase if there is no a remaster.
Now all the players are like they know everything about balance and everything about the game. They want all servers been based to them and their class. If someone else kill them with a counter class they will cry and they say the server is unbalance. I remember from old official interlude days how messed up was olympiad there. There was no balance between classes and there was classes that was better in olympiad than others and this is a fact but noone cried cause we still discover things that days. We were new in this game ,we love it, we make friendships, we try to discover more and more things about the game but nowdays this is destroyed.
Private Servers: There are admins that care only for money and open the server again and again with wipes without make any change in their server and believe me still works fine. But there also other admins that care about the server they try daily to change things to make their server better ,but there comes the community of the server, " WHY YOU CHANGE THAT , YOU DESTROY THE SERVER , I WILL LEAVE " In the other hand if you dont make updates we have the players "YOU WIPE THE SERVER WITH NO CHANGES, EVERY SEASON THE SAME SHIT, YOU CARE ONLY FOR MONEY, DO SOME CHANGES PLEASE, FIX THAT PLEASE" Players nowdays will never be happy trust me.
So i can assure you some admins make mistakes but the biggest issue about nowdays is the LINEAGE COMMUNITY and i talk as a player now. Nowdays players want to change server every month without any specific reason , either some clans wanted to move to another server and others move with them or i dunno.
I have more to say but i dont want to make it unreadable. Thats from me.