What is the general consensus on server emptyness?

then why are you bothering to try to argue about the games population if you haven't logged in in a few weeks? that is longer then this thread has been going.

I didn't realize we were engaged in a real time discussion of the population. I thought we were talking about the general state of the population over the last while.

Or are you taking the position that the population has undergone a significant change in the last few weeks? That would be interesting.

Seeing as how I'm right about that, you can be sure to collect your foot from your mouth at your earliest convenience.

OMG YES!!! I'm already camping a name for my new electric controller.

And you are going to level it starting in Atlas/Galaxy?

I'll be one of those few. Heroes I'll continue to make in Paragon. Villains however will be made in Praetoria, and if GR lives up to only half my hopes I'll be making more villains. I never really enjoyed the content redside.


Edit: Actually I'm going to be more interested in doing the side-switching first when GR goes live than starting new characters. I'm gonna be moving almost a dozen characters over to blueside.

This is pretty much my take, though I don't have a dozen characters to switch from redside to blueside. Any new villain-ATs I make will be made in Praetoria so as to avoid redside altogether. I have one Demon MM sitting at level 20 ready to do side-switching missions, and I may bring over my VEAT and a Fire/Pain Corruptor as well. I'm hoping to make a new Dominator in Praetoria, and probably a Stalker as well. Whatever I end up making, I'm just happy to have the ATs available to play in an environment I want to play them in.

Wow, the assumed intelligence of hypothetical new GR players plummets with each page in this thread.

What if those new players don't realise that you need a PC to run the game? What if they try to put the CD in their XBox or their microwave and then complain to all their friends that it doesn't work? That would be terrible press for the game!

and with this post, and a few of your others, i write off anything further you have to say. your idea of "healthy" is not shared by only a slim few. and honestly, if you haven't logged in for the past few weeks(up to a month) then you don't know what the population at this time is like. but then of course, you seem to fail to understand that since the game came out, people have been crying about server mergers everytime someone logs off to go to sleep.

So your position is that the population has changed significantly within the last 3 weeks. Thanks for opening your mouth and removing all doubt...

I do however agree that my view of healthy population is shared by the majority like you just said.

Double fail in one post. Not a record for you, but definitely one of your better efforts in looking the fool.

Honestly is this the best you guys have to represent you? Someone who makes the claim that the population has changed significantly enough in the last 3 weeks that I can't possibly know the state of it. If that were true take a guess in which direction said population has gone as more and more people enter into the beta? Ya you fail. Not to mention such a powerful command of the English language that he inadvertently states that my view is shared by the majority. I guess it can get more embarrassing for the anti-merge heretics than the "list" that gets quoted. Who'da thunk it?

so, because you don't have a leg to stand on you resort to attacks. good position as the last poster that attacked people was banned. keep going. your on the right track for that. i also don't like having words put in my mouth. last person that tried that was laughed off of the forums and we haven't seen them since. i think you need to take your delusional paranoia and go somewhere else for now.

Like getting my point through to most of you guys throughout this conversation it has little to do with intelligence, but rather repeatedly driving the point home.

If the option to start in Rogue Isles is available some people will inevitably pick it even with the box art showing a bronze statue of Emperor Cole. Almost all of "us" will be playing low level toons in Praetoria, or on lvl 20+ toons. Would you say that a new player that picks to start in one of the old starting zones will be getting the best experience possible?

If you can honestly say "yes" to that question then you may be exactly what you depicted as the type of person that makes cheese toast in a vertical toaster.

Maybe they pick the Rogue Isles and then realize it is empty and decide to try again in Nova. Or maybe they just keep trucking along thinking that they are in some extended multi-level tutorial. Or they just figure that soon enough other people will have to show up, it's an MMO after all. Maybe they say screw this wasteland.

I don't think PS wants to bank on "maybe" with this expansion. I can't think of many business models that leave it up to "maybe". But on the theme of maybe; maybe they should think about making it absolutely clear in no uncertain terms that Nova is where you should be starting if you are a new player when GR goes live. Maybe.

Now before anyone says "waaaah choices". If you recommended this game to a friend and they picked it up for GR launch and they were rolling up a new toon, upon which they turn and ask "Should I start in Nova or Mercy?" What would you say?

That may seem like another tinfoil dish in the microwave scenario, but I'm starting to wonder just what is going on in some of your minds.

So you aren't saying the population has significantly changed within the last 3 weeks now? yes or no, you are all over the map.

The things is that I do have legs to stand on. Playing the victim now doesn't negate your last post and what you said in it. I'm sorry if it hurt your feelings that I pointed out how contradictory you are being. Maybe don't base your position on something that you can't even consistently present in a single post and stuff like that won't happen.

So the population has changed in 3 weeks? What if I told you I just logged in, what would that do to your newest approach that you obviously thought would be some sort of silver bullet? Would me logging in more recently than you subsequently render your position null? Maybe you can elaborate what was going through your mind when you thought that appealing to the authority of recent population would somehow discredit me.

So do I. If it helps diffuse the situation I'm just sitting here drinking my coffee and actually chuckling about the stuff in this thread. There is just so much swiss cheese being posted that I can't resist making a sandwich.

I'm almost thinking of flipping sides though because in this thread and in the Aion merge thread the anti-merge side is just getting destroyed. In discussions like these where none of what we say matters in the least it is more fun to have a good battle than to continually beat one side down. This thread is pretty much a write off seeing as the anti-merge side hasn't made a good point in pages now. The Aion thread is a bit more exciting in a raving lunatic sort of way. It is still managing to draw out large colored font in some posts and you have to respect that kind of passion. Regardless of how blind it may be.

Well this certainly bodes well for the population on Redside if there are a majority of layers with your perspective.

I 'unno. I know that anecdotes are of limited use at the scales we're talking about, but... I know a lot of people who played this game in ye olden dayes of i0-i3 or so and quit, then came back for a bit when CoV hit. Very few of them plan to come back for GR by comparison.

The wait from CoH to CoV was a year and a half or so. It's been about five years since CoV. Most of the people I know who've quit the game moved on to a different MMO in those five years, or gave up MMOs altogether. As far as new players go, I can't see GR pulling in as many of those as CoV did, especially with The Old Republic on the near horizon.

But I'll be pleasantly surprised if I'm wrong.

(Unless you literally just mean Praetoria will be more crowded than villainside was right after release, in which case I kinda agree. I know a few people who didn't want to touch villains at all who have no problem with playing a grayer faction.)

Lots of spew, so little substance. Watch how easy this is, frosticus:

The pro-merge crowd hasn't made a good point in many a page now. every argument they throw out has been destroyed as a useless waste of time.

See? Anyone can throw around baseless statements.

I'm glad you're taking a while to rest and drink some coffee. You must be really tired from running around carrying the goalposts from place to place. You're ostensibly defending the position of "server merges are necessary" but you keep retreating to much more easily defended positions like "there aren't a lot of people logging in these days" or "non-Praetorian characters will not get the best starting experience possible". Then, once you establish that you are 100% correct, you act like everything from there to "server merge!" is so obvious it's not even worth talking about.

Here's something you can bank on: server merges are always interpreted as a sign of a game "dying". It doesn't matter how much better the game becomes on the new, more populated servers, if you put out a new game box and merge some servers at the same time, you are sending out a signal that your game is not worth buying because it won't be around for long anyway.

Some people "maybe" being turned off the game after they buy it because they start a non-Praetorian on a lesser-populated server is nothing compared to many, many people who have never played the game being definitely turned off of ever trying it when they hear of server merges.

There you go! Good point. In order for there to be server mergers, it has to make financial sense.

If you (generic you, not Bill Z) don't like playing on a low population server, then move or make new characters on high population characters.

There are plenty of people that like playing on low population servers. And I have to believe that a number of them would leave if their preferred server was merged. So lost subscriptions would be another factor to account for.

To paraphrase Mandy Patinkin, "I do not think that word means what you think it means."

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

I'm sorry but I've held that opinion since the first character I made. The only thing that kept me playing the villains I had was the SG/VG I was in. When they fell apart I returned to heroside until VEATS came out. I hoped they would bring new content and revive my interest in the faction. Boy was I disappointed.

I made the prediction that launching GR without significant updates to Redside content would create a vacuum on that side. There are too many people waiting to fill blue with redside ATs and not nearly enough who want to go the other way.

The devs don't have to hate villains, they just need to take away one of the few advantages of playing them. The ATs.