Restrictions and penalties have always been unpopular with some percentage of the player base.
Have they ever tried inducements to Early or Mid War arenas? Something like a perk multiplier where you can earn perks at 1.5x or 2x the rate of the Late War arena? Could be advertised in a MTD pop up when players login maybe.
Really just trying to think of carrot vs stick approaches...
The minor arenas are already used for perk/achievements farming. Things like this can only be pushed so far, there are some considerable gameplay downsides.
And while I always had wished for a healthy population in all arenas, we don't even have the numbers for that anymore. We can't even fill up the LW to a satisfying level in my timezone. I don't see much sense in trying to split up 60 players total over three arenas.
As a side remark, the EW didn't only suffer from a "my plane or nothing" attitude, but also a lot from the arena settings. For example for the most time the arena was utterly dominated by the Hurricane II, and having the same ack and town settings with a lot slower and lesss capable set of attack planes didn't work well either.
But the opportunity to change anything with a few tweaks is long gone.
