How "Alive" is the game's population on here anyway?
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.
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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.
Although Virtue and Freedom have the largest populations, the other servers are very nice, very cozy communities. The most populated can be a curse at times, Freedom has a history of being locked out during some events due to high population. I play mainly on Virtue, but I keep characters on other servers as well. Remember you are never locked to a server!
Hope you sign on with us OP, it's a great time and well worth the entry fee. If you poke around and look at people's info ingame you will see a great many of us with five years or more paid time in the game. We wouldn't stick around if the game was trash. You know you wanna join us!
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Seriously, Agge hit on the exact reason. Many people coming from other MMOs are surprised by the lack of "out in the open" content that CoX has. Your best bet is to go to the forum for the server you play on and find out what the global channels are on your server. Use those to coordinate teaming, Task Force/Strike Forces, badge hunting, etc.
Best of luck and welcome to the game and the forums!
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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.
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.
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I happen to be playing two MMOs at the moment, this one and Aion. In Aion, pretty much *everything* happens outside. Hunting, missions are done outside, leveling's outside, travel's not that fast - yes, there are areas that seem very empty (see also desert... not deserted, but desert) but in general, everyone's in full view doing everything.
Here - before everyone got burned out on them - you'd get, say, a zombie or Rikti raid, and a good pile of people at (say) the top of the hill by the train in Talos... and when it's done, *poof,* everyone's off in their own instanced missions or whatnot.
It makes a difference in feel, yes.
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
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Two highest servers in terms of population are Freedom and Virtue.
Virtue is also the "unofficial roleplaying server" so if you're interested in that, that's where to go.
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.
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It takes a certain mindset, especially if you come from a game that doesn't use a lot of instancing, not to think you're the only hero patrolling the entire server sometimes. But I would recommend new players concerned about the server populations to spend a little time lurking the various server forums, find out what the communities are like, and perhaps picking up on that server's global channels.
I'd also recommend having a slightly thick skin initially, until they get into the groove of socializing within a long-established community.
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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.
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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....
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Those are damn expensive tickets! O_O
*hugs local $2.75 matinee Cinemark*
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My "local" matinee is $6-7.25 depending on which direction I drive 20 miles in.
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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.
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Lu-ghe-bu...
Anyway, as others have pointed out, at any given time, most of the population is indoors, running their {or their teammates'} missions in their isolated instances. If you want to get an eyeball estimate, open up your "Find Member" search window and just click "search" without setting any criteria - the number of the bottom will give you the current number of logged-on players on your side {heroes or villains}, discounting any which may have went into /hide. You can't send a tell to any of them if you're on a trial account but again, if you like what you see so far, twenty bucks for a month's worth of gameplay might be a good investment.
Those are damn expensive tickets! O_O
*hugs local $2.75 matinee Cinemark* |
For our Tinseltown, 4.75 for first matinee, 5.75 after that, then 8.75 for nighttime.
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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.
On the bad side, however:
- 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).
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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:
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. |
To open the team window, click the word TEAM at the top edge of the chat window.
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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
Eric's right. All the paying customers are alive. The dead ones cancelled their subs.
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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.
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![]() 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 |
This, although I tried it about 4 years ago and kept playing WoW as I was already kinda deep into it and wasn't ready to let go of it at the time. Just recently started playing again a couple months ago and really wish I'd have given it a better shot back when I first started it.
I've tried a ton of other MMOs and as stated above the community in CoX is top notch... yes like in any MMO you're going to have your share of idiots but they've been very VERY few compared to the other MMOs that I've tried. Even on the forums if you happen to read a thread where people are having a disagreement that's all it is... on other forums it turns into a flamewar with nothing but insults because the people involved lack the intelligence to have a civil difference of opinion.
Anyway, got off-track... the game's awesome... the community makes it that much better.
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Although Virtue and Freedom have the largest populations, the other servers are very nice, very cozy communities. The most populated can be a curse at times, Freedom has a history of being locked out during some events due to high population. I play mainly on Virtue, but I keep characters on other servers as well. Remember you are never locked to a server!
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OP, If you find yourself too invested in a toon on server X, you can always entertain the option of transferring that toon elsewhere. The process is pretty seamless (for a charge, of course), and I use that for my main when I want to visit a server population for the holidays.
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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.
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