For whatever it's worth, my perspective of Victory is that outside of a smallish (4-5 hours maybe?) window, the global channels are *essential* if you want to do anything other than solo. And even then, if you're too far away from that primetime window, the globals still might not be enough. I'm in the UK so if I play late (for a worknight) I'm logging off just as it starts to pick up a bit, and these days I only log onto Victory when I've already seen that something is forming via globals while playing on another server. Probably 80-90% of my teaming on Victory is task forces, formed on Victory Forum and/or Badges. Trials? I got on a lot of them in the week or three after they were first released, but since then I rarely see any forming (and see a few fail to form).
At the time of typing, which is mid-morning weekend for me, there's less than 40 visible players between blue and redside combined (12 red, 26 blue, of which 14 are 50s). My past experience says that of the ones unteamed, most will turn down team requests because they'd rather solo, and of the ones shown to be in a team, most of the time they're in special private friends/sg-only teams and won't accept strangers - the folks happy to pug either aren't online yet, or have long since moved to the busier servers. Advertising a team forming over any of the globals at this time of day has a chance of getting a small (2-3 people) team going, a very slim chance of more, and a high likelihood of no response at all.
So yeah, whether Victory (or most of the other servers for that matter) is high, medium, or low pop depends a lot on when you're able to log on, and whether you're aware of the global channels. If either of those two conditions are unfavourable it will seem like a dead server, plain and simple. But the few times I have been able to log on during the busy period I can fully understand why some people might dismiss or refute this.
I still consider Victory to be my "home server", but that's a tenuous thread that only persists because of the global channels - without them I'd have completed my jump-ship to Virtue & Freedom years ago.
For whatever it's worth, my perspective of Victory is that outside of a smallish (4-5 hours maybe?) window, the global channels are *essential* if you want to do anything other than solo. And even then, if you're too far away from that primetime window, the globals still might not be enough. I'm in the UK so if I play late (for a worknight) I'm logging off just as it starts to pick up a bit, and these days I only log onto Victory when I've already seen that something is forming via globals while playing on another server. Probably 80-90% of my teaming on Victory is task forces, formed on Victory Forum and/or Badges. Trials? I got on a lot of them in the week or three after they were first released, but since then I rarely see any forming (and see a few fail to form).
At the time of typing, which is mid-morning weekend for me, there's less than 40 visible players between blue and redside combined (12 red, 26 blue, of which 14 are 50s). My past experience says that of the ones unteamed, most will turn down team requests because they'd rather solo, and of the ones shown to be in a team, most of the time they're in special private friends/sg-only teams and won't accept strangers - the folks happy to pug either aren't online yet, or have long since moved to the busier servers. Advertising a team forming over any of the globals at this time of day has a chance of getting a small (2-3 people) team going, a very slim chance of more, and a high likelihood of no response at all.
So yeah, whether Victory (or most of the other servers for that matter) is high, medium, or low pop depends a lot on when you're able to log on, and whether you're aware of the global channels. If either of those two conditions are unfavourable it will seem like a dead server, plain and simple. But the few times I have been able to log on during the busy period I can fully understand why some people might dismiss or refute this.
I still consider Victory to be my "home server", but that's a tenuous thread that only persists because of the global channels - without them I'd have completed my jump-ship to Virtue & Freedom years ago.
So yay global channels