Dear SOE...Population

Could You tell me how do You check number of players ? BTW Christmas is coming. Many people spend this time with families, doesn't take their computers with them. That might be the reason.

And you may see more after Christmas when Santa brings them a PC actually capable of running the game decently.

I have been keeping track once in a while of the steam side which is from this. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ On the Sony side there is no telling as they generally hide those stats. The only other resource is www.xfire.com/games but that isn't as good anymore for games tracked by steam.

The low mid high and very high numbers are unknown, most likely it is closer to.
low = 0-25
med = 26-75
high = 76=95
very high = 96-100

Also judging from your comment, you are not seeing the real issue.
Most servers end up only having all their players on indar, or 90% of each team on their own map, thus its super boring to easily spawn kill or be spawn killed over and over.

The game rocked more in beta than it did in release, back when we only had 1 map no matter where you went you had HUGE battles of 50+ tanks.
Now to find that you must go to a popular server, at a popular time, on the only map people play on, indar in most cases.

Thanks

Commenting to agree with the population issue. Can't even find anyone to support right now, and tanks camping the spawn room as usual.
People seem to only play on Indar, and the other maps they take turns capping bases. Earlier today I went to Amerish and all we did was hop in a Galaxy, land, cap base, jump in, land, cap base- so on. Falling behind meant you got spawn camped by someone else capping what you just capped.

Server merge would prolly help, I feel.

Sadly enough this happens on a lot of servers, most of the new beginners don't have a clue that they can switch continents.
i think a way to fix this problem is to:

a: let new players spawn randomly on different continents, or further explain the continent switch.
B: add more continents and continent lock, so we can finallly lock INDAR.

witch will make it easier to redirect people to other continents, and actually do something there..
because we like amerish and esamir.. but a fight with abou 100 people is just boring sometimes.

Sony is too busy dealing with the horrible optimization issues caused by how ****** Forgelight is to do ANYHING productive for the game.

Don't worry guys, in January we get to redownload the game and then they'll give us their 6 month plan.

My question:

Why not just hold an open beta and release the game in January?

Yeah, I agree with that. When I first started playing I had no idea there were warp gates, or how to find my friends.

I hate not having anyone to play with, either. Wish there was a better system for grouping up with people and working together. It's not enjoyable to join a squad and then press insert only to find the leaders AFK in who knows where. Also equally not fun getting randomly kicked and having no idea why. I enjoy working with a team, but the game seems to encourage everyone grabbing a tank or lib and then just camping a spawn room.

While on the subject of continents, thought it was funny that I opened the map just now and saw this:
Indar - All red
Esamir - All blue
Amerish - All purple

Guess I know why no one is around =/

That's pretty much what is happening.

I agree and disagree with this thread. I agree that a lot of MMOs and MMO style games launch with too many servers....like Star Wars...they had waaaaaaaaaay to many servers the population was spread thin and people were bored and alone in an MMO and left. Once you lose players it's almost impossible to have them come back.

Now with Planetside 2 I feel that they number of servers are just fine...mind you I play on Sol Tech and I never have a hard time looking for people to play with or battle.

No, you are right, people will get on this game get shot out of a cannon hovering above the atmosphere shooting you into the battle on a random location of a map, and your goal is to shoot people and not be shot.

I think it can be disorientating, but certainly the concept of what is suppose to be happening takes very little thought.

If you never played a computer game, that's fine, you hop on it and you learn, if you never played a console game, you do the same thing, although in the first planetside they had this VR room to give you a basic understanding of weapons and vehicles and how the game works, this one doesn't have a sanctuary or a VR room in that sanctuary due to streamlined gameplay reasons.

What I don't understand though is this constant barrage of "games are too hard and too complex" today, because that is the complete opposite, a lot of games today really hold your hand, you really don't need to think as it does it for you, what I did when I first got on this game was examined that "A" "B" "C" symbols mean capture points you need to control to take a facility. I learned that a gun symbol means a terminal to change loadouts and weapons, that "tank" or other vehicle symbols means a vehicle spawn terminal. I didn't know what some things meant however, so I quickly pressed the "enter" key on my keyboard to see if that allows me to talk and attempted the /yell /whisper /tell /shout to see which ones worked to ask the question "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS SYMBOL OVER HERE?" which i got a response rather quickly, I learned about Spawn control terminals, shield generators, and other things that I didn't know.

The first thing however I understood was this game was battlefield, if you had no console battlefield experience prior to this game, the concept of control points may be alien to you! However you shouldn't fret, your brain should immediately tell you to SEE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE DO AND LEARN FROM THEM!

So you learn, you learn by doing things, seeing things, and just exploring yourself, people don't have this drive anymore they hope that everything is done for them and I feel sad for these people for when the can opener doesn't open the can itself, or when the door doesn't turn the knob on its own, or how your tv doesn't plug itself into the power, or when your computer doesn't build itself.

I understand wholeheartedly the need for a tutorial, I don't see it being the huge game ruining thing that is shooing people away, it is another entirely different issue.

What is hurting the population is just a bad game, with a bad company putting its worse man as project leader.

However, nothing that a little time won't unveil for everyone else to be informed.

they should already be putting up the option to simply allow you to pay a small fee to move your character and all his possessions to another server.

I think it is silly to not even have the option available right away at launch.

Actually, it seems you dont undertand.

If we are not in the same zone in Eve, you cant affect me (directly). The same applies to continents here. Eve has chosen to link all the zones via one server. They have simply chosen to link a limited set of zones per server with PS2. This is a design choice, not a hardware limitation. It is something that could be changed.. and has been done so with other games. In fact many new games try to use this to keep zones full of poeple.

I've been playing some on a secondary character on Connery. It's much more active at all times of day than Genudine. And yet with tens of hours, thousands of certs, and real cash invested in my character on Genudine, I can't really move or start over.

At the very least, give us free/cheap server transfers we can use once a month or something, let us solve the problem ourselves. I hate going in every day feeling like I'm being punished by picking the wrong server on launch day, knowing that my gameplay is inferior, and having no solutions.

Buy a zephyr and spawncamp with a lib?

I still refuse to rocketpod ***** on my Skeeter out of pride. I don't regret it at all.

I've been seeing a bunch of new low level players, which is a good sign, unless it's just people creating more characters on the winning side to join the zerg. Genudine still turns into a ghost town around midnight even during this double xp period, while Connery remains active later.

I suspect this 2x thing combined with people being on break is propping up the game, so I'm dreading what happens after it ends, people don't play nearly as much, and we go back to having 1-2 fights going in primetime.

Population isn't the problem, the game it's self is doing well, it's the concept and design what people don't like.
Most players of 2012/2013 Only care about mindlessly slaughtering each other in close quarters.
Many players who played this game at the start have left because there is no Infantry battles left, where as before you could be a Infantry person or a Armour person. Now its Armour or get farmed. That's why this F2P game has lower pops on servers even though there is no subscription.

Well Miller which i thought was quite balanced, well just isnt anymore.

Feel sorry for the NC in all honesty...