Evil_Legacy

Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen

The problem with your analysis here, is that you're only looking at a snapshot of a moment in time. There might be 5000 people online right this second. That doesn't mean only those 5000 subscribers logged on today. What about the ones that logged on this morning and played for a couple hours? What the ones that logged on after you did your count?

I would bet there are more players that only log on for an hour or two than the hardcore ones that are logged on for hours and hours. My WAG would be that however many players are logged on at any one moment in time, that the number of actual players who logged on that day is at least double that amount.

Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba

Just for giggles:

1am CST

Virtue Red: 315
Virtue Blue: 518
833

Pinnacle Red: 45
Pinnacle Blue: 77
122

Victory Red: 32
Victory Blue: 92
124

11 servers total

Being nice, we'll average those three and multiple that by eleven for 3960 users found ignoring the hidden. Knowing that Freedom and Virtue are really the only high pop servers, it would probably be closer to (2*833)+(9*125) = 2791 users found ignoring the hidden.

But it's late. People are in beta. People are on test. People are waiting for GR go live.

While it's certainly possible that the vast majority of us stay hidden from searches, I do, I find it difficult to believe. But let's go with a generous assumption that 25% of the playerbase is hidden an we'll go with the big number of 4000 across all servers, hell let's bump that all that way to 5500 players logged in.

Out of 120000 subscribers at last count? Only 4.5% (and again, those are VERY generous estimates) of the subscriber base is logged in on a Friday night?

I'd be concerned if I was in charge. But I don't have the subscriber numbers. I don't know the percentage of hidden players. Hell, I didn't even get the exact numbers for every server.

About one month after GR go live, we should check again. During primetime. Tallying up all the servers. Maybe we'll be closer to 10% of subscribed players actually playing the game.

Originally Posted by Celidya

I invested the inf for the first build, strictly PvE, so i was just thinking about a second build, i didn't invest anything for it yet.

But i guess i'll just wait for another character i like that would be more suited for that, thanks for the answers ^^

Originally Posted by Justaris

The usual (and correct) points about hide options, the game being largely instanced, the summer/pre-GR slump, etc have already been made, so I'm not going to rehash all that. It's been said, the copy/paste has been done, fine.

Yes, population is lower now than it once was. There are many reasons for this, including time of year, the fact that a beta is currently in progress, the fact that a major new issue/expansion is upcoming, and just that this is a six-year-old MMO that doesn't currently have a major shelf presene (though this will change with GR). So yeah, population is lower.

This is not, in and of itself, a cause for concern. It is not a reason to merge servers. In fact, merging servers is quite likely to drive significant numbers of longtime players away from the game as this thread has already demonstrated (albeit in an anecdotal sampling).

The only issue raised in this thread that I can see as a legitimate cause for concern is one of new player perception. Servers other than Freedom & Virtue are not 'ghost towns' despite what some fond of hyperbole choose to believe, but to a new player unfamiliar with global channels, tells and our less-than-stellar team search system, that perception is an understandable one.

To recap: it's the perception that is the problem, not the reality. However, it's still a problem. On the one hand we have players on these supposedly dead servers who team quite nicely thank you very much. I'm one of them. So what's the difference? In most cases it's use of global channels and/or savvy use of the team /search and /tell systems. These aren't things that it is reasonable to expect a new player to know about and may not be reasonable to expect a new player to learn. In short, they shouldn't have to learn it in order to team well.

So what's the solution? Move to Freedom, where the blind invites flow like water? No, obviously not, because we have that option now and it does nothing to address concerns on other servers, not to mention that "lol u picked wrong server n00b rofl" isn't the message we want to send. So merge the servers, so the blind invites flow like blood? Also no, that could easily create more problems than it solves, and there's a better solution with none of the fallout. The solution is to fix the teaming interface so that new players (and not-so-new players) can find teams more easily without the need for the extraneous measures most of us now take for granted. We need a "team looking for more" option. The aforementioned "auto-add" feature where your character automatically links up with a team that has a matching "looking for more" set up would be even better.

Such a system would solve the problem of a new player's 'ghost town" erroneous perception without the numerous problems of a server merge (one of which happens to be sending a signal to those same new players that the game may be dying*).





* No, the game is not dying.

Originally Posted by Forbin_Project

How dare people refute the doomcrying with facts. Simple truth is that despite all the doom and gloom people have been trying to proclaim every 2-3 months for six years about server emptiness, the game is still here and still going strong.