They need to not do the DLC's the way they do now. They segment the community so bad.
Also, no one likes good servers. They all go to metro 24/7 or somethign with instant vehicle spawns. There are no stock servers with all the maps that anyone plays. It would be by far the best server ever, but you can't get people to join them.
The guys I play with have tried multiple times to populate a bone stock all maps server and failed every time.
I rented a server from release of BF3 up until a little after the CQ DLC. It was 64 player normal, rotating the big maps from the vanilla release and then I added the B2K maps when they came out.
Server was always full and had a big stash of regulars. They requested even longer vehicle spawns than stock It was awesome. The trick to getting a good server going is to rent one day one of release of the game, fill a niche, which 64 player conquest did - and I found; not going off the hook with moderation. The only rules I had on the server were don't cheat and don't use racial slurs. Let some friends know about it and posted it on reddit regularly, got it off the ground fast. Using a votekick/voteban addon with a sane quantity of yes votes needed is the best way to have the server moderate itself via the players. They would get rid of the obvious blatant hackers which PB was useless for.
It just died out shortly after CQ released, lack of interest, boredom and probably that DLC squashed it. The few remaining active 64 CQ servers are attached to big gaming clans for the most part.
I'll give it another go when BF4 comes out and see what comes of it. It's just not worth keeping it up once it goes dead. Cost me about $90 a month for the server and a TS server, no point when there is no one on the server. You really need core regulars who will join, and a good number, a 64 player server needs to show at least 20-30 to fill up to 64, then you hope to reel in regular players from the constantly joining players once your server is showing full.