Exactly what Sw2b said… bots are pure toxic for a server.
As soon as people see bots in a server they will always assume that it’s bots playing even if there’s real people on and we will soon be categorised with the other 95% of servers which run bots.
I think one of the good things about L!VE is that if you see players in the server list you know 100% they are real people.
I get it’s frustrating that the server is only busy for a few hours each night and empty inbetween but there’s no one on.
I guess the only way to combat that is stay in spec for longer and see if anyone else joins.
We do have plans to combat this in the near future, I have over 4000 email addresses from players registered on sof2.org who I intend to email soon advertising L!VE.
The only solution I can think of is to increase the number of regular players we have (which is going up as time goes on) and this will fill in the times when the server is not as busy / empty.