So I'm thinking of coming back

Piestro, you may have numbers regarding subscribers/active accounts, but that doesn't accurately represent how many of those people are actually playing at the moment. If there were more people actively playing the server populations would be medium to high. Especially at typically peak play times. Also, most of the people on here that are saying they never have a problem with grouping etc. have a consistent group of friends or a friend that they play with.

I am not talking about EQ1. I have never played it.

I can see exactly how many people are playing at any time. The numbers are healthy.

I think I touched a nerve, sorry. I love EQ2 and have been playing for 8 years. I am just giving my personal opinion/observation. I don't understand why we can't love this game and yet have differing opinions without people becoming defensive just because they don't agree with us. Long live EQ2. Also, I am sure the OP will be able to make their own assessment soon enough.

Just correcting misinformation in the thread. The OP should most certainly make their own assessment.

With all due respect to you, me saying that the population is low on most of the servers is not misinformation, it is a fact. Any one can see that for themselves at any time when they view the server list (with the exception of AB and FP which fluctuate between low and medium).

Might I ask what the number of active players is that determines what is Low and what is Medium? That is important information in determining how many are online at one time, and I personally have never seen that detail released.

Guk is *healthy* ?

I have to agree if each server can support 20,000 people then low would be anything below 6,667 (not that I think this is by any means the actual number a server can support just being illustrative). Without knowing what each of those designations represents one cannot make a definitive call in either direction.

It's not necessarily a fixed number. As the servers increase in capacity (and we've done a fair amount of hardware work over the last year) the servers can support more and so it changes. Essentially the information is very relative, and only useful as such.

Thanks for that info, Piestro! My question wasn't directed at you though, but it's nice to learn more on how that works.

I was simply pointing out that people cannot judge how "populated" a server is at any given time unless they know those numbers. Low may not mean only 10 peeps are playing, it could mean 2500 are, but 2501 would make it medium. So using the Status page without knowing the numbers really doesn't tell you anything other than allowing you to compare different servers.

Edit: Correct me if I'm wrong, but that and if the servers are down or locked is the only use of the server status page, IMO.

I could be wrong (it has happened a couple of times*), but unless the equipment between the servers is roughly equivalent, then the comparison between servers may not be accurate either. If they decided to upgrade the server equipment on all servers, they probably wouldn't do it all at once. They would probably upgrade one or two (or at most three if they are feeling really lucky) at a time. So if they decided to upgrade, for example, Freeport and AB servers first, that would increase the capacity of those servers and show a lower population relative to their new capacity - but that doesn't change the relative population on those two servers with respect to the population of the other servers.

However, if the equipment is roughly equivalent and remains so, then the status page could conceivably be used as a basis for comparison, as you suggested. I suggest that people create characters during the time that they will normally be playing and check the in-game loads that it shows during character creation.

* That I'll admit to, anyway.

I don't think that's true. I almost always PUG, on Everfrost now but I came from Splitpaw and still have a couple of toons there. If you actually bother to make the group, you'll get people wanting to join that just want to follow.

Bleh. So true. Add another assumption to my list....all servers are created equal?

EQ2 is a very MASSIVE world- appearance of lower pop.
Lots of people spend a good deal of time in their guild halls - appearance of lower pop.
Lots of people have played through this game many times, get PLs- appearance of lower pop.
Those people who have played for years mostly only play endgame- appearance of lower pop.
Most relevant content is instanced, not contested after SF xpack- appearance of lower pop.
Lots of casuals keep to themselves, or with 1 or 2 friends- appearance of lower pop.


That is not to say that some servers aren't suffering, they most certainly are ( -looks at Nagafen and Guk- ). Just last night on one of my Freeport server toons, I got invited to a Fallen Gate group, and a Stormhold group...just ran in solo and there were people in there and I got an invite without even asking.
This game is aging- nicely I might add-, and with age games always slow down. No, there aren't legions of new players logging into the game everyday, but there is a dedicated playerbase, with some new players coming in, and some old ones leaving (most of which, including myself, come back), and in my not-so-expert opinion, there are too many servers, and the cost to transfer toons is too high.

All in all, if endgame raiding is your thing, then there is plenty of action, as others have stated.

I played EQ2 solely for 8+ years. I had a lot of fun over the years but back in December me and my guild mates decided to explore some other games as EQ2 was starting to get stale. We ran the gambit trying many, many games such as Vanguard and LOTRO to Age of Conan, Star Trek Online and Star Wars : The Old Republic to name a few. We really enjoy SWTOR and have been playing there now since late February. That game feels healthy with an active population. Some areas will have 180-220 people in one instance of a zone with 2-3 instances at times and chat is always flowing. We did try to come back to EQ2 last month and we played daily for a couple of weeks. The game did feel very empty compared to when we quit 6 months earlier. We play on the AB server and have done so since launch in 2004. Things just did not feel the same for us so we are now splitting out time between EQ2 and SWTOR while we await news on EQNext next month.

Yipe. That just gives me horror visions of 2 FPS and dying before I even get to see a mob hit me.

Piestro, If you're not going to publish any data to support your argument your words have as much meaning as a politicians...

I doubt that he is allowed to give out numbers if he wants to retain his job.

Obviously it's your choice to believe me or not. I, unlike others in this thread, actually have the information though. So while I may fall into the meaningful as a politician category, I've still got actual information as opposed to supposition.

Mostly. Having significant hardware discrepancies between servers isn't a good recipe for reliability. They might not be completely identical but they are darn close.

This is a significant challenge as a game matures. Obviously as a game gets larger there are more areas and niche interests that draw people in different directions. I'm not as familiar with EQ2 as the original, I spent years working on the original and only months directly involved with EQ2, but in the original EQ there are areas that don't see traffic on an average day.
One of the things that the game team is constantly mindful of is how to address these issues. You want people to have natural areas of convergence that are meaningful, but keep some value to previous content as well. The team has done different things over the years, golden path for example, to address these particular issues. I expect they'll continue to find ways to address this issue into the future.