If PS is boring because of a lack of players then that itself is likely a leading reason for a lack of players. It's hard to get more players that stay if the game is boring. Therefore we would need to do something to make people stay besides RP without shifting the game's focus completely away from it.
From what I understand PS was popular because it was novel at the time, had decent graphics(while currently it's subpar) and for the time decent gameplay(which again in my opinion is subpar nowadays). the last two points are made worse by the performance and limitations of the server/game. (sidenote as is obvious I wasn't there so this is just how I interpreted comments as seen in Gossip or on the forum.)
The move to the unreal engine may solve/diminish these things somewhat but gameplay may need to be looked at to make it more engaging than it currently is, what to do however is quite hard and I really have no clue. One idea I would entertain is to make crafting more freeflowing, instead of having strict items that need to be combined you would have items that fit a certain role and combine them that way. haves certain types of guards, certain types of handles and certain types of blades, each modifying the end result in a certain way. For tea this may simply means that tea can be made from any combination of plants, some of which may be very bad and some combinations very good. Something like this would give quite a different dimension to alchemy and it promotes people trying things out instead of just following instructions aswel as specialization.
Although I do entertain that idea I know it's, politely said, a huge pain to create and maintain so it's likely infeasible to actually do that.
