EC and Atamara can't hold players very well, and loss of players on those continents gains a wide audience due to being large continents.
Joining new realms is a complete crapshoot. You can get a totally loser realm that blows your experience of the entire game. For example, here's an anecdotal story on my experience with a new character on EC:
Having had my character in Perdan killed in a war, I decided to go somewhere new on EC. I chose Fontan, specifically because of the changing political scene in the north (most of my experience on EC has been in the south), and the possibility of joining a war against Westmoor. So I started a new character and marched off toward the capital of Ashforth.
It was
three days before anyone in Fontan sent a realm-wide message. And that was a copy/paste of a buro work report. During that entire time no one sent me a "Welcome to Fontan" message, no lords offered an oath, and there was no discussion of anything, at all. So three days of "Your men enjoy some free time." Since then, there have been a few messages, but all of the nature of "We need more police work in Krimml." You'd have sworn that this realm was already dead.
If a new player had joined this realm, and seen this "activity", then I'd expect them to just quit. Now, you could argue that the people in Fontan knew I was not a new player, and so didn't bother with the welcome messages. But then you could also say that a relative of the recently deceased ruler of Perdan joining Fontan would deserve special recognition.
Anyway, my point is that the new player experience drives new player retention. And quite often, from what I have heard, the new player experience can sometimes be pretty bad. Unfortunately we don't have any data on where new players actually start new characters, and how long they stick around. Tim (Anaris) might be able to do some data mining in the dev server, but I wouldn't have any idea what to look for, or what any of it would mean.
