How "Alive" is the game's population on here anyway?

I just started the City of Heroes trial today, and after playing for an hour or two, I started realzing somthing. There seems to be nobody on, at all. Maybe i just picked a dead server, but, how many people can i expect if i get on the "popular" server? I've been thinking about buying this game, I don't want to if all the servers are going to be generally empty

Most of the population is not out in the world. City utilizes instancing very heavily, so the game world does not have the hordes of people running around kill-stealing and camping and such that a lot of other games suffer from.

The subscription numbers hover around 130k, give or take 10k, and that is extremely healthy for a fairly 'niche' MMO.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

OK well first off the game is quite lively on any given server, with allowances for time of day and day of the week (Tuesday at 2 PM is not the busiest hour ). Even on the smaller/lower population servers things are going on at all hours. On the busy servers you can quite literally find yourself fighting off invitations to mission teams, task forces, themed events, PVP teams/temp power missions, and lord knows what else. Some things to do to ensure a good experience, should you decide to join us permanently:

• Look up and join your server's global channels. There's almost certainly a few to help you team and have a good time.
• Post on your server's boards. Look for events.
• When you have a good time with someone, ask to global them! I've made a lot of great friends just in the past few weeks this way, and we mutually see each other out for teaming.
• Form your own teams! This is a biggie. The star doesn't bite. Just make a team, take anyone at all, and go forth and conquer. Remember, in this game, you don't need a tank/healer/dps combo to win everything forever. Pretty much any team makeup works for 99% of the game content.

I may help to note that the game's teaming features are built around finding and contacting people even when they are in instances. Although not everyone is going to want to team, the best way to find a team is probably not to run around looking for crowds. I'm not sure that the trial account has access to the team search feature, so you may have to buy the game before you can really start finding teams.

It can also help to join a Supergroup.

Also, your Trial Account is limited, see here.

For $20 you can buy the game, have an unrestricted account and the first month is free. If you don't like it, then don't renew the subscription.

For $20 in real life, you can get six hours of a movie in a theater. For $20 on City of Heroes, you can get hundreds of hours of entertainment in the first month. I think it's worth it.

Six hours of movies...You mean DVD rentals? Cause for $20 in LA you can get to see ONE (1) movie and if you're lucky you can buy a hot dog /soda combo or popcorn and soda combo. Either way that's all 20 bucks is going to get you. Heaven forbid you might want to drink water instead of soda, then the price goes up.

Dang this movie town....

Those are damn expensive tickets! O_O

*hugs local $2.75 matinee Cinemark*

My "local" matinee is $6-7.25 depending on which direction I drive 20 miles in.

Well, our "dead" server Triumph (often near the top of the list at login) just had a blast doing an impromptu Mothership Raid.

Much fun was had by all, several characters levelled (my Scorching Wrath among them) and we gained lots of merits & Inf.

I heard about the raid on one of the global channels mentioned by several posters, and add my hearty recommendation to join them!

Oh, and on the movie matinee threadjack - my "first run" theater matinees are $5 before noon & $6-7 between noon & 6 p.m. But we also have an excellent "second run" theater that has $0.50 matinees and $1.00 movies in the evening - if you can stand to wait until then.

This really can't be emphasized enough, and it's something that even people who've played the game in years past sometimes forget. Not only is this game instance-heavy, but it's become even more instance-heavy over the years since its launch. As a result, a majority of the population of any given server is likely to be in mission or SG base instances a majority of the time rather than being visible to a player running around the city at large.

There are good points and bad points to this setup. On the good side:

• No spawn camping. Since the vast majority of the game's mission objectives occur within missions, there's no possibility of another team griefing you or taking a spawn, nor will you ever have to wait for a spawn that someone else has come along and wiped out. There are a very small number of exceptions to this, but compared to many other MMOs it's a huge difference.
• Everyone can do everything. An unlimited number of teams can do Synapse's Task Force and take on The Clockwork King if they so choose. Sometimes players even form multiple teams and race one another. You won't be locked out of content because someone else is doing it/just did it - because you get your instance of it and they get theirs.
• Because we take eight or fewer players and put them in their own instance, larger aggregates of dozens or hundreds of players tend to be on the rare side, which means far less lag when doing content. While there is some 'raid-style' content such as Invasions, Hamidion raids and the Rikti Mothership which do involve very large numbers of players all on the same map, these are the exception rather than the rule.

• Heavy instancing sometimes creates the false impression that a server is empty or a 'ghost town'. Players who do not make use of the tools for finding players or who refuse to learn them may have difficulty getting on teams since brute force methods like running up to people you see or shouting in broadcast do not work well when most people are not there to see you or to hear you.
• There are, despite the best efforts of the Devs to add new content on a regular basis, only so many instance maps. Eventually you will play them all. Repetition is part of any MMO and in overland-oriented MMOs you would see the same areas again and again - here you see the same warehouses, underground bases, demonic lairs, etc over and over again. There are special maps for most of the special content, which is a welcome bonus, but you will begin to notice you've seen a particular layout a time or two in the regular fare.
• Progress in instances is not saved unless another member of the team remains in the instance to keep it open. Therefore, in solo play, you may sometimes have to restart an instance if you get disconnected or need to log out before the objective is complete. This may not neccessarily be a negative, however, as it allows you to reset the instance at will if you choose to for whatever reason (to keep the mission to share with others, to farm the mission for desirable rewards, whatever).

THE GAME IS DYING!
WE HAVE TO MERGE THE SERVERS!

Oh, come on, you knew it was just a matter of time until someone said it.


BTW, re Jade_Dragon's comment:

Welcome to City of Heroes

I tried this game 4 years ago, and I'm still here, after trying many others. The community is better here than any other I have been on and this game done not need phat lewt to be fun...but it helps

I play on just about all of the servers, some are quieter thatn others, but never had problems teaming on any of them. Try Freedom or Virtue first, and remember their is the same % of idiots on all servers, so on the higher populated ones you will see more of them but it evens itself out

Good luck

So I can ask Eric if he's alive, and he'll stab himself?

The power in my hands... it's awesome.

Three points for the OP:
1) Apologies on the extremely limited nature of the trial sub. Goldspammers were misusing them in many, many ways and eventually the restrictions had to be put in.

2) As far as players: I saw a set of numbers a while back and Freedom and Virtue had more players online at that given time than all the other servers put together. (I don't remember if that was EACH or TOGETHER.) So while Infinity may be third in typical population, it's a really distant third.

3) Freedom has a reputation for having more jerks and idiots than other servers. Some of this may be due to the sheer number of players, but some may be a "New York City" effect- players on Freedom will tend to meet an unlimited number of new teammates, so if they're enormous jerks they don't get called on it in any meaningful way. So jerks get fixed less on Freedom than they do on other servers. This is not a scientific theory because I can't figure out any way to test it.

I feel pretty dead, myself.

I'm a Freedom person now. I was a Liberty and that's where I got my first and only 50.

Doing a /whoall on Liberty is a sad looking thing, but you get asked to team nearly as much. I'd say there are more TF opportunities on Liberty per capita.

Freedom get a much worse rap than it really should, once you learn how to use Ignore. We have a horrible broadcast spamming problem in Atlas. It's young teens, I hope. Lots of the trial people come to us, so you have people who don't know their role in a team and, tanks especially, will cause a team wipe.

Re: Dead servers. I made a Peacebringer on Pinnacle once. Yeah, doubled the population. As soon as I showed up in Atlas I was greeted by two other players who invited me to a sewer team with them. They were shockingly helpful. Though I deleted the PB and haven't been back, I do understand the small town feel.

Even populations as large as Champion are markedly different from Virtue and Freedom. Virtue has their share of broadcast spammers, and their parenthesis talk. ((They use this when they are talking out of character, but really, not everyone.)) Champion has NO broadcast spammers from the time I was there. And it seems to be at least three times as large as Liberty.

If you want to level in a natural manner with people who have respect for the game, I recommend Liberty. The same can be had anywhere, except on Perigrine Island on Freedom, I am embarrassed to say.

Oh, and welcome to CoX.

Try a stalker too on Red Side. Though the cities kind of get me down over there.