What server should I play on?

I recently came back to the game after a very long break...3-4 years maybe. Max level character was 19 Defender prior. I understand that the population is not as high as when I was playing previously so I wanted to know which server I should play on in order to actually play the game without having to get free farms (although once in awhile I might). I really liked my defender but 1-10 is pretty painful and would prefer to be able to find a group for missions. So far I have tried Freedom because it seemed like a lot of people played there, but I found out Heroes side is farm nation and Villain side is a vacant lot. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.


Also if any of you have a link to a beginner guide that would help. Not like simple mechanics or build guide but like where to find important things. I was playing a Tanker he is level 22ish and I was looking for new enhancements but I don't know the name of the SOs that I need so I have to right click info everyone which is tedious.


Thanks in advanced from a noob.

Virtue. Has close enough to Freedom's population to call it even, but it's without the Freedumb part. Virtue LFG Beta is a good channel to use to help get on teams. VU2011 can be decent, but the first one seems more active.

Here is a good place for info. Search for what you are looking for and it should answer your question. If you need help beyond that, ask away.

SOs can be gotten in Talos, or RWZ for blue side. I would say use Talos since you'll likely be there anyway.

EDIT: The better answer to your SO question is looking at this list. This is the order in which any store will have them.

Well, similar in population would be Virtue. (Virtue, frankly, tends to have a higher load at times.) Infinity typically is considered "third," but that spot swaps around a fair bit.

Personally, I tend to play most heavily on Victory and Pinnacle, and don't tend to have issues finding teams.

What I'd suggest, though, is to pop down to the server forums and find a group that's recruiting somewhere that sounds interesting and matches your play schedule and join them.

Also, do a quick search (since I don't have the info) on the Mentor project - it's set up for people to help new/returning players get started and get help.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Come and join us over on Protector and/or Guardian.

Sure we may be the suburbs, but we're a friendly bunch and there's always something going on.

Make a couple different guys on all the servers you haven't played yet, join the global channels of that server, and see which one works out best for you.

I wager most of us are biased as to server selection.

ive been playing solely on victory for the last 5 years and not had issues finding teams usually when i want to run something

Wow you guys are fast. Thanks for all the pointers I am going to look into server channels and figure out how to join them. I have one last question I think. I made a claws/elec brute the other night to try out and I enjoyed it, then I found myself on my tanker grouping with brutes in Atlas city. So my question is how do villains end up grouping with Heroes and vice verse and how do you get from villain areas to hero areas? Is that part of the "Going Rogue" Expansion?

Oh and Protector is where I started playing originally so I might just give my old defender a shot again.

All you need to do is get to lv 20 and then shift your alignment to Rogue.

Once you get to rogue, you can move freely between hero and villain sides and pick up teams on both sides.

I can't imagine that anyone might be biased towards the server they spend almost all their time on (Guardian), that's just INCONCEIVABLE.

I'll echo what others have said about checking out several different servers and making use of the more popular global channels on each server.

I don't think anyone's mentioned this, but the servers are listed in reverse order of their load (basically their population at that time but there are things that can affect load other than simple population) with the last server you logged into on top.

Freedom is always either the top or 2nd server, unfortunately with the most players comes the largest number of jerks. Yes, the good players outnumber the jerks but there's just so many of them that you're certain to run into them.

Virtue is the other server in the "top 2" and it does seem to have a smaller number of jerks... it also has a lot of very strange people who ((talk like this)) a lot of the time and play and chat in character. It's where most of the more hardcore role players have migrated to. Generally they're nice enough teammates but be warned, it can get a bit weird at times

We also recently merged server lists with the European players so we've added Union, Defiant (both English speaking servers), Vigilance (French) and Zukunft (German). Union & Defiant both seem to be fairly active in non-prime time; which makes sense because many of the players there are on the other side of the world after all.