There is a serious lack of open community. If you aren’t in a big org (which doesn’t exist because now its just a bunch of alliance orgs) or part of an alliance of orgs then scraping up a bunch of randoms is highly unlikely. Everything is dictated by several things:
Your org (and by contrast alliance) does things at a specific time or day.
People multi log and do content and sell loot rights thus negating an open community/game/teaming
The same is applied in PvP
Paying to play this game only on weekends due to population is not worth the money
The population is poor/extremely low which is why the above reasons exist. If people say “population is great/ok/fair/good on weekends” etc then they are fabricating the true state of this game. You cant reasonably play this game during the week. There is a window on the weekend to play this game.
AO was not meant to be a solo game. AO was created when MMOs were new and they took MM to heart. A lot of the content is built around team content in order to make a meaningful/fast progression. There is solo content and I am not saying you cant “play” the game at all because you cant team with others but you will find yourself doing a lot of stuff solo to make some progression and thus feel lonely and have no real drive or place in the world.
The game has been in decline for several years, the game has also stagnated in content with nothing new planned indefinitely.
Play the game if you intend to deal with playing solo. Play the game if you dont mind playing on the weekend in raid type situations or meaningful progression. Play the game if you can justify the cost in logging on/playing 8 days a month (every weekend for a month and thus wasting potentially 22 days of play time). Play the game if you want to just visit a while. But to say that AO is alive and well is far from the truth, it is a dusty book in an abandoned house that will never be occupied.