Actually, I don't personally think the expansion stands a chance of increasing the player counts enough to be what you or any of the other people complaining would consider "healthy".
Why? Because people are already settled into games they know they like and want to play often. CoD4 and L4D are really fun games, why would anyone have a reason to check out a game that basically came out over a year ago? Midway is on the brink of bankruptcy, they are not going to be able to advertise the expansion enough to maximize interest in the game again.
So who is Epic making this expansion for, if that's the case? The people who are sticking around or who enjoy the game but are not playing it because of this reason or that reason. They really have no other reason to make the expansion.
That's my fear aswell, but what will be will be i guess.
And, frankly, UT has never been that popular of a game. If you take UT2004 even during it's prime and took out all the demo servers/players and bots on unpopulated servers, you would probably get more of a glimpse of what I mean.
Even UT during it's heyday only ever had a 3000 or so people on at one time. We could hope for that kind of popularity for a new UT game but there is so much more competition and UT's style of game is just not popular anymore anyway. I think it's safe to say that no UT game is ever going to enjoy the kind of popularity that games like CoD4 and L4D enjoy, nor even the kind of popularity that UT had.
Epic says that about half of the people who play UT never play it online. I wouldn't be surprised if it's more like 75% or more, personally.
I wont disagree with that, i never expected UT3 to draw in the huge crowds that CoD4 can boast about, it was never going to happen, this is a game for a nieche market.
However, it is very unfortunate that it is not doing all that well within its own nieche, that so many UT fans don't want to play it because they are unhappy with so many aspects of it (and judging by what people say, the gameplay is not the problem, a few have some issues with it that could be fixed for them by mutators, but on the whole, its mostly things that could have been avoided if the game had seen more development and polish, and just removing most of thease things could have been enough for them to give UT3 a fair shake).
This is why i find all this arguing here so pointless, on one hand you have players who have strong opinions about "this or that is broken/not good enough, and that sucks!", and on the other you have players shouting back with "sure its not perfect but i can personally live with it, so STFU whiner!".. but in the end, it is a problem for us all, because this
is a nieche game, and as such, if a sizeable portion of its fanbase is unhappy and doesen't wish to play, it hurts everyone in the form of very low player counts, it becomes a problem for all, hence, no good comes of dismissing thease problems as trivial or "unfair" or "whining".
We would all be better off if thease problems did not exist, it would be in everyone's interest to see them fixed, so why can't we have some sober discussions about it?