I would say that the player numbers being as low as they are points to some fundamental problem with the game.
The issues I can see are the following:
- Relic didn't settle on an audience to cater for (single player, co-op players, pvp players etc.) and delivered a half arsed product for all those audience, i.e. they developed a game that needed 30 million USD of budget but only had 10 million USD;
- The gameplay is too similar to CoH1 and CoH2 - those games offer a more mature offering;
- Content is lacking - not enough maps for starters and weak mod support; and
- The team game format does not give a good team play experience - 3v3 and 4v4 tends to devolve into multiple 1v1s with no natural co-operation or teamwork taking place.
1) I kind of disagree here, from the pre-release interviews and presentations, they have picked single player campaign players for their go-to target audience, leaving pretty much all of CoH2 multiplayer crowd behind.
2) I do not find that to be a disadvantage, if you alter gameplay completely, you end up with whole different game, if you don't, you need to put some weight on the new mechanics you introduce, gameplay-wise I find CoH3 superior enough to CoH2, its the amount of mp content and features(replays, observer, map variety) that I find lacking.
3) I'm indifferent to mod support, but I do agree, as just mentioned earlier about the content, specifically mp content.
4) True, but it wasn't really any different in earlier CoH games, players have ability to go from their "line" to support ally, but they never seem to do so and CoH isn't really feasable for team game meta-plays like in BAR for example.