Not exactly. The "we are not 15 years old" is a cliche and has zero impact on the game.
The fact that people nowadays are less willing to waste time doing nothing (which is true) and less willing to hunt "shit spawns" only means that the game should feel even more active with similar numbers. But the reason so many people sit in depot back in 2004 was also (and mostly) because there was no space for them. Not only all depots were crowded but literally every spawn. Many spawns that today are being claimed were therefore considered public back then. So in today's reality you'd have less people standing in depot, but even more insane fightings over spawns (when it already was insane then).
When Tibiantis started 300 players online were enough to make such a crowd that some used to hunt even single wild warrior spawn next to hills. There were alot of complaints on the lack of spawns which didn't stop even at 150 online. Even if you take 50% bigger map and 3x faster respawn it shouldn't take more than several hundreds to fill it up completly.
That is why the depots in old Tibia were so full with "only" 850 online.
Over 3000 "active players" online is hilariously absurd. With that number of players you'd easily have 100 people in each town's depot only of those who are refilling at the moment / buying something / died a minute ago etc. And it's not even a slight exeggaration. It wasn't really that long ago when the most popular servers barely had 1/10 of the online today's servers have. These numbers devaluate over past years to the point that they mean nothing now. And it still continues, I won't be surprised if someone pops up with a server with 5000 online this year.
