Population & Competition

pupurun

I have an ending trial (really 8 hours is not enough to fully decide) and i concluded to this 2 matters

I fear that the game is underpopulated. And that fact by itself is not that bad.I played other underpopulated games and i had great fun. The issue with the low population here gets magnified by the lack of competition amongst the 3 factions.Of course this is my opinion but from what i was told..not a lot goes down with the faction wars and usually all sides are super friendly and relaxed...Could i be wrong?

MMOExposed

i would like to know this iAs well

Phaserlight

I would say that is just an opinion.  I happen to agree that the game is underpopulated, because of course I would like to see more people play.  VO is a single shard, single server game, it is cross platform including Android tablets, and we just learned it will be preloaded on the upcoming Lenovo Ideapad... so accessibility isn't really an issue.  I like to think VO is slowly gaining momentum, and while it is dwarfed by the size of playerbases like those dedicated to Eve or WoW it is by no means small by indie standards.  Space can feel empty at times particularly as you are getting to know the layout of the galaxy (traversing the "ring" takes about 20 minutes end to end) however certain areas have high levels of activity at certain times... as a demonstration here is a video recorded during the weekly nation war, taken last week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q956o2_abb8

As far as attitude is concerned, you will probably find as many types as their are players... ranging from Zen-like goodwill toward all fellow denizens of space of the human variety, to guilds titled things like "The Homicidal Cult".  I would say that if you haven't encountered fierce competition, keep playing.  You need to have at least Combat license 3 to be accepted into the military, which leads to the border battles between the Serco and Itani.  You can travel down to Greyspace at any time, however Grey is synonymous with lawlessness and home to many pirate clans.  Greyspace is also the primary playing field for a week-by-week contest called Capture the Cargo, complete with web rankings.

Could space be more populated?  Yes, by orders of magnitude.  However that hasn't given me cause to abandon this game or even to let my subscription lapse over the years, and I am keeping my fingers crossed that more players are slowly arriving.  As Guild Software is an indie company this game will likely be around for a while... and I feel like I've gotten to know the devs (I actually got to meet the lead developer 'Incarnate' in person very briefly, though long enough to get my hardcopy of the backstory signed) and this is definitely their vision and they have been stalwart about staying true to that vision.

So my verdict is give it a try.  If you like it then you can stay, if not you don't have much to lose from downloading less than 300 megabytes.  If the worst criticism that is leveled at an MMO is not enough people play it, then it is far ahead of many others.

NasherUK

It's very underpopulated, which is a shame because the game itself isn't to bad.  I played this game years ago when it was still quite new and even then the most I ever saw online at once was about 80, with it regularly sitting a low as 15-20.  It's simply not enough to make an MMO feel alive, 20 is barely enough to fill most counterstrike servers.

Sadly sci-fi games (especially space sims) havn't pulled in massive numbers since the late 90s, everyone is in to fantasy stuff at the moment

 

The developers should stick it on steam.  That pretty much saved global agenda which was quickly dying, they put it on steam and offered a limited free-to-play option (slower XP gains, less loot, can't create guilds, etc).  Now it's packed with players.