Where is everybody?

Ewww.. why would anyone want to play on Freedom or Virtue?

Because Virtue is the best server... duh

to be honest i wish they would do a server merge and then take a tip of the cap from CO, make char names reusable, and only global name be ( insert word i cant rember how to spell meaning one of a kind ) it works well in CO, although i dislike the rest of the game in general. i mean after all dont most people here now there friends my global mostly anyway with all the toon hopping alot of us do as needed.

Good point. However... Well, I've never really seen a lot of people around the Black Market, even back in the day. At most, I've seen maybe a dozen people camping out, but that was back when people spent literally HOURS in there just learning the system. It very quickly petered down to only a few at a time, and even then it hasn't dropped too much. But here's the thing - the Black Market is a functional location that people go to because it has a lot of their needs in close proximity to the same location, AND it's in a place that tends to be easily accessible from everywhere. You'd expect a lot of people to be there.

Atlas Park, though? Other than boredom and some kind of flatline nostalgia, why WOULD you go there at all? I knew a few people who went there, and I know exactly why they went - the people. One liked the crowds, the other enjoyed studying the characters. When the people moved on to the Atlas Park Architect building, there was no more reason to hang out in the plaza. Those who went there for the people left, the people who hanged out stopped hanging out since it wasn't as crowded so they left, and no-one has returned, because no-one has had a reason to. In fact, expecting the crowds to come back to the plaza after the bubble burst is a lot like trying to unscramble an egg. It just doesn't work like that.

And there's another reason why you rarely meet people in general. Ours is a HEAVILY instanced game, to the point of being almost entirely so. The few overworld missions the game does offer most people regard as junk and something to skip, and most of the travelling that the game offers is seen as a nuisance and a waste of time. The days of hunting Hydra in Perez Park are gone. Unless we had SO MANY concurrent users that the airspace were jam-packed, all you're really going to see is people dashing from one place to another, people who went AFK or people doing business in a public location like a store or a trainer. You're not going to see people in the streets en masse, because there is no REASON for them to spend much time outside. Let me quote Yhatzee from his Wolfenstein review. I think he says it best.

And it is difficult to quote Yhatzee without getting hit with the language filter at least once. While I am obviously not applying this as a direct description, as I don't feel our overworld is crap, the point remains that the freedom of exploration is limited, so there's not much of that to do, and as long as there isn't much to do in it, the overworld DOES become just an obstacle to get to the next ******* stage. Hence, you won't see a lot of people there.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

While I assume this is a (at least partly) tongue in cheek rhetorical question, I'm gonna answer anyway

For me, I *much* prefer to team over solo (I usually get bored after one mission soloing, even on my strong solo chars). I also tend to play off-peak hours due to living in the UK. Quite simply, Freedom and Virtue are the best servers to find the numbers required for any reliable teaming action.

To illustrate:

Today I logged onto my home/original server, Victory, at what for me is mid-afternoon. /search showed a whopping 24 visible heroes (redside had 20 villains). That's just too low for there to be much chance of more than a duo or maybe trio (and quite possibly none of those 24 will be interested in teaming at all, at least with a random stranger). From past experience, the hero numbers are a little lower than usual (I'd expect nearer 40) which I attribute to the holiday season, but villainside that's about the norm.

So I logged onto one of my alts on Freedom. /search showed 174 visible heroes. Although by no means crowded, that's a lot healthier when it comes to trying to find or form a team. Indeed, I did find a team there on this occasion.

So that's one reason for playing Freedom or Virtue: outside of a handful of hours of the day they by far the best servers for somebody looking for pickup teams (or rather, during those handful of hours they're the best, and outside of them they're practically the only option).

possible, school is still on, i'd put money on gr bring things back. when ma got its marketing blitz, it brought some people in. some exploiters, some not, but i expect gr to have another marketing rush and i expect some old hands to return for the new stuff. funny thing is, i think it may help redside, if you can go between both sides, i expect a lot of middle grounders double dipping on content and teaming opportunities.

Yeah there's a great idea. Let's take advice from a game that's hemorrhaging customers left and right. A game that was forced to offer free reactivation weekends less than three months after being released in a pathetic attempt to entice the people that cancelled their subs back. A game that's going to take another huge drop in subs when STO is released and the gang that bought 6 month CO subs for the STO beta access leave.

Oh and merging the servers? Go troll somewhere else.

guaranteed!

The end of the winter event will empty out Pocket D and make the Atlas Park head-counters happy.

Oh wait, you were talking about ACTUAL population, not meaningless personal open zone observation.

NM. =P

The servers are all nice in their own ways

Well there's your answer! We're all lurking on the forums instead of playing.

hm, you expect a 'knuckle-rapping' for taking the position that anyone who doesn't agree with you is, what? Deluded, stupid or lying?

An intelligent person can observe the game and say it's obvious the population has declined, while another intelligent person can make the same observations and conclude it hasn't dropped at all. Without access to actual numbers, any method of observation is suspect - particularly since new game elements alter the dynamics of the population (shifting into missions, out of missions, to specific zones, etc).

Maybe a knuckle sandwich then?

Multi-tasking isn't hard

That's actually a good point, come to think of it. If you're gonna' take the position that "anyone who disagrees is wrong," then predicting negative reaction is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kind of like predicting that poking Cthulu with a stick will get you killed. Yeah, I kind of figured that one out.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.