Translation: Ranged must be made so useless that nobody wants to play it, nothing less is acceptable 
It's not about useless it's about basic population dynamics.
Ranged must work in a way that makes people play it when there are many natural prey to ranged on the server : shieldless inf mostly.
And it must also be made in a way that when there is many ranged around, the best choice is not to bring your own ranged alt. But currently it clearly is.
Right now there are so many ranged that it attracts nothing but more ranged, hence why the servers are depopulating with everything else. It's not about making ranged useless as a whole, but making it less useful than other classes when the amount of ranged on the server is already too high, just as people get pikes to deal with cav stacks, heavy weapons and shield breakers to deal with shielders, and ranged to deal with other infantry. Classes that are not ranged are easily dealt with and actually detrimental to a team when there is too much of them. This is the reason a team full of 2h or full of cav or full of shielders it hardly a problem for the enemy team, as 2h and shielders have rather strong hard counters, and cav is generally useless unless when the enemy is distracted by other units.
