Pinnacle... dead?

Just getting back into CoH after being gone for a bit. All my toons are on Pinnacle, and the server is dead, dead, dead. Several times I have been the only one of my toons level on!

I play mostly during EST daytime hours, so it's not peak time by any means, but the Incarnate stuff REQUIRES you to have a team of AT LEAST 8, and oftentimes there aren't even 8 players that level even on.

My question is: Are they going to do server mergers? Most servers are ghost towns now, with only 2 actually showing any life.....

Pinnacle is not dead. Join Pinnbadges if you haven't already.

Also remember, just because people aren't logged in on a character of your level and waiting for you, doesn't mean they're not willing and able to switch the moment they see something interesting happening.

I don't make a habit of sitting around on my 50 waiting for someone else to start a Trial. If there isn't one forming when I login and I want one, I start it. If I don't particularly need one, I will SWITCH TO A LOW LEVEL ALT and play. That doesn't mean I'm not willing to hop back and find a character to run a trial on for the Merits, it just means I've got all the characters I really want to Incarnate out done.

I'm a mod for PinnBadges, and I swear to you 9 times out of 10 all it takes to make something happen is someone with enough motivation to say "I'm running an X" and a bit of patience to recruit for a little while.

What level are your characters? Have you joined one of the global channels for the server? They are PinnBadges and Cozmic's Playground. Most of the server plays on their top tier toons and we usually can get something going on if you ar ein one of those channels.

Pinnacle's roughly as dead as I am, and I'm not typing from beyond the grave. It's one of the two main servers I play on (the other being Victory.)

See my Guides and Tutorials

While I don't know that I'd say Pinnacle is dead dead, I do have to admit that it's a lot harder than it used to be to find people of my own level around when I'm doing a pickup team. It used to be that I could /search and find a zillion people of my own level that I could drop a tell to and say, "Hey, want to join a Level <X> mission team?" Now I find myself in a similar position to the OP from time to time. (Part of it is probably that a lot of people are off playing their still-relatively-shiny-and-new Praetorian characters, and hence don't show up in the /search screen from the hero side.)

This is not a case of me wanting someone else to run something. This is a case of me running something (and I run PUGs frequently enough that I wrote a guide on how to do it well (see signature), thank you very much) and having a hard time finding enough people to fill the team.

Now, to be fair, this is somewhat ameliorated by the way that sidekicking/exemplaring and difficulty setting have improved—I can invite as many lower- or higher-level people as I want without having to worry about being able to pair them with mentors, and higher-level people still get XP and access to powers 5 levels ahead so I don't have to feel embarrassed about asking them to join a lowbie team. And I can fine-tune the spawn levels enough that I don't have to worry about filling the team to get as many mobs as I can handle. But it still makes me long for the halcyon days when I had to narrow /search parameters down considerably to keep from hitting that 50-character limit—and makes me hope that CoH Freedom will bring more life back to the servers in general.

While Pinnacle is one of the smaller servers it's hardly "dead". Admittedly I haven't played much there in a few months but I do have a number of characters there I occasionally play; I haven't had a lot of trouble getting something going anytime I've wanted.

Back about 8 months ago I was spending the majority of my time on Pin and I doubt much has changed. Like any server the key is using the popular global channels for that server. You're unlikely to get much action by simply standing around and waiting for someone to swoop down and invite you but a shout out on the global to the effect of "Hey, we're putting together a ____ with 5 open slots, who wants in?" will do wonders. Even a "Is anyone starting something a level ____ can get in on?" will usually do the trick.

I generally play on Guardian, Pinnacle and Infinity and I find it's not all that hard to find something to do at most any time. On the other hand if you're always going to be on in very off peak times you may want to consider one of our two English speaking European servers; with many of the players on them being on the other side of the world their peak times will be at times when the NA servers are off peak.

A slightly different perspective. I have had more team invites in the last week than I have had in the last several months on Pinnacle and thought this was a good sign that people are coming back. These were not Pinnbadges call outs, these were tells from folks looking to put together teams. No joke. I play in the est evening time however, so my experience is different than the OP.

Not readin' the whole thing... but I'm there. The Dawn Sisters are there, and I'm still working on Rose Dawn, who's currently a 41.6. Only 7.4 to go!

/ought to be done in 2 years...

I would also mention that I was thinking of moving Lvl 50's off Justice (which was/is certainly a well populated server) a while back because it seemed to have had such a big drop in activity.

Turned out it was because so many people were playing in the Beta that was hot back then. We have the same thing going on now, perhaps even worse, with a large number of players looking at all the new stuff coming.

So be patient. A big change is coming.

Jak

I've just got back into the game. I have some alts on Pinnacle (as well as Liberty, Virtue, and my new home Defiant). I haven't had any more trouble than in the past getting teams.

Though it seems to me that it's a wee bit difficult to get teams anywhere other than the 41-50 grind, or at level 50 (on any server), because people are rather enamored by the shiny new Incarnate stuff.

yeah right now alot of people are playing the beta so the servers might appear to be lower pop than they really are, this should change pretty soon. also join pinnbadges, great place to find groups. I run something every night generally and i normally log on when i get home in the afternoons for 30 minutes or so to do market stuff and I see bafs and lambdas forming all the time around 1600 hours central time so there are people willing to do stuff, even low level task forces. normally you have to take the initiative to start something though. ive asked plenty of times who is interested in running something, got no answer, then I would say ok im starting taskforce x, send tell, get 20 responses. so start up something, pass leader once the team is together if you dont feel comfortable leading it. most people know what to do on most tfs anyway, its not like wow where the leader has to hold peoples hands to get them to do what they should do.

I've tried joining PinnBadges. And I get to watch others post and interact, without being able to myself. I get the feeling I'm supposed to figure out the magical way to find the right person to beg to get permission...