Virtue or Freedom?

What the difference and when does it get busy? I mean as in when many people gets on first?
I want to join highest and early population server.

Freedom is the most populated server. Virtue is a close second and the unofficial roleplaying server.

Most populated also means the first to be locked out during events though, so it's good to have characters on a few servers.

Most populated also means most likely to be laggy during "rushes".

Justice might be good for an 'early' server as well, as has fair numbers of aussies/kiwis playing in thier prime time, or US early morning.

That's true...when I lived in Virginia, I found myself frequently teamed with our friends Down Under when I played in the mornings.

Freedom is notorious for idiots, Virtue is notorious for roleplayers. Pick your poison.

During off-hours, Justice is probably your best bet thanks to us Aussies. Of course, you could always roll alts on different servers and play whichever is most convenient.

Freedom is pretty good for off-hours play I've found (night shifter here). On the other hand I haven't tried Justice yet.

A little information on the different servers can be found here. That site, by the way, is pretty much the best resource on the internet for all things City of Heroes.

Basically, everyone's said it, though.

Freedom's got the highest population, but has a not-undeserved reputation for being filled with semi-literate morons who type like they're text messaging and are more interested in powerleveling and farming than in playing the rest of the game or helping new people. Which is not to say that everyone on the server is like that; every server has those people and no server is nothing but those people, but Freedom's easily got the most. And the high population can sometimes mean lag and/or lockouts, though that's generally only a problem for the first few days after an new issue launches and during special events like Double XP Weekends, which only happen a few times a year. It's also worth mentioning that apparently the upcoming issue 16 will include the implementation of a "queue" server, so in the future, lockouts shouldn't be an issue so much as sometimes having to wait five minutes or so to get into your server when you first log on.

Virtue is the second most populated (and the second most likely to have the same lag/lockout issues as Freedom), and generally a more... eloquent, I guess?... population, but it's the role-playing server. Some people take that as a very good thing, some as a very bad one. That doesn't mean anyone's going to force you to roleplay (there's no official roleplaying server, it's just that Virtue is where the roleplayers tend to congregate), but people will be doing it all around you, talking in ((double parentheses)) to indicate out-of-character speech, and occasionally doing weirder stuff like erotic roleplay in Pocket D. You can avoid stuff like that very, very easily if it's not your thing, but if you come to Virtue, you should know that it is there to be avoided. Also, catgirls.

Besides that, there's Infinity, which is generally accepted as the third-most-populated server and doesn't have the same stigmas attached to it that Freedom and Virtue do. But from what most people can tell, there's a pretty big gap between the second and third positions, population-wise.

And there's Justice, which is (again, unofficially) where the Australian/New Zealander players can be found in the largest numbers. For this reason, Justice tends to be a better place to find a team during "off-peak" hours in North America. If you tend to play in the early morning, you may want to give Justice a shot.

The others are probably not what you want if what you're looking for is a large population. Or, as others have suggested, you may want to try making characters on a few different servers and seeing which one "feels" right; they've all got their own personalities and communities, and if you were to, say, hook up with a supergroup (guild, if you're coming from another MMO) that works well for you and plays when you tend to be on, then server population may not be an issue.

Also, you don't necessarily have to tie yourself to one particular server,or faction, or archetype, or character; This game, much more than your average MMO, encourages players to dabble in a little bit of everything.

To clarify the good and the bad on Freedom: I have a theory that because the population is so high, people rarely team with the same people twice on Pickup Groups. This means that [if you're badly behaved] you tend to go longer without being checked, and [if someone on your team is badly behaved] you're more likely to put an SEP field on them then try to actually fix the problem. Freedom is therefore, I think, slower to turn ignorant, unsocialized players into knowlegeable, sociable players than other servers.

In other "You may want *this* server" suggestions: I believe there are a lot of people playing on Victory in European time zones.

I haven't paid too much attention to the whines and replies about being locked out, but don't some of the repliers point out that being "refused" once does not equate to never being able to get on? I seem to recall most of them advise backing out by one screen then trying again and that after a few tries and only a couple of minutes they can usually make it in.

Or maybe I'm misremembering that???

Of course the queue system in issue 16 should eliminate the need to do that.

You can all calm down. Apperantly he picked Freedom.

//Jack

Huzzah! My home team wins!

You've all heard that they are implementing login queues in Issue 16 players on busy servers don't need to repeatedly login hoping that a space has opened up during special events.

That 2x weekend was also the only one they didn't reactivate old accounts. That probably also had something to with those servers not being overloaded this time.