Two players on. Still a full shift.
Three people online and nothing happening is how a server dies. These give your players something to actually do on a quiet night: peds that start the conversation, and a dispatcher that answers the radio and does the work. ESX, QBCore, QBox and standalone.
They remember what they did
Lead someone on a five-minute chase, spike their tyres, cuff them, then ask why they ran.
They cannot claim they were parked.
The server is never dead
That's what these were built for, on my own server. Peds that start the conversation and a dispatcher that answers the radio mean there's still something happening when the player count is low.