Hello there Edgar44!
There still are People around on both P2P (Which is getting more active on both factions again atm) and F2P (which has more Players).
Runes system is also still there. Runes also still make you do more dmg. If you create a new Char you will get a set of lvl 6 runes at a certain level (along with some rather important perma cs items up to epic)
There is no free trial for the P2P Servers but there´s some websites ->
https://www.dragallods.com/ &
https://smugglersparadise.blogspot.com/ where you can check infos about P2P Server. Also we have 2 Content Creators for the P2P Server if you would like to see how they are doing. The website where you could check the population is not quite up-to-date but right now
players are full geared and waiting for the new big Patch to arrive.

Also they have a Discord Server for the P2P Server. I´m not on there but you can see the Link in Dragagons Signature. So you could ask there for more infos about the P2P since they will be able to help better than me!
Also there is a Collectors Edition coming every few patches which would give you some subscription time (and mounts/outfits) might be interesting to know too!
Hope that helped already! Don´t hesitate to ask anything else!
Greetings!