I just checked back after a long break and I can see from the server stats that its still deserted
I've been playing TF2 lately, and I saw something that some servers did. On the server list, they supposedly have 23/24 players, so you join and you see the players. However if you type "ping" in console you will see that they are all actually bots. This is pretty sneaky because it usually says "BOT" on the ping column but here they had fake pings listed for the bots.
As more real players joined, the bots left until only real players were in there.
Maybe this should be implemented on the server?
Even if it says BOT in the ping column, its better to wait for players to join by playing against bots than not doing anything at all.