new player question, is this game dead?

[Silushun]

The thing you've got to look at is, this isn't WoW this is Salem, don't expect the population to be booming. It's a close nit game, much like HnH (Haven and Hearth) even though you lack members, you still see them throughout the world. Not many people like the fact that Permanent Death is in the game so they don't join.

[dmdisco]

right now

Plymouth
Users 94
Load 16%

Roanoke
Users 142
Load 16%

Jamestown
Users 117
Load 13%

but usely theres a bit more 150+ on at 1800cet

and there a quite a few only loggin on from time to time in the week and playing a bit more on the weekends

p.s. Plymouth is hazardous to your health so that might explain why there is so few on.

[Gallient]

The game is definitely very niche, and if you get too much of a population in a concentrated area people will just start killing their neighbors with dat permadeath, will be last man standing.

[SwiftXShadow]

The thing you've got to look at is, this isn't WoW this is Salem, don't expect the population to be booming. It's a close nit game, much like HnH (Haven and Hearth) even though you lack members, you still see them throughout the world. Not many people like the fact that Permanent Death is in the game so they don't join.

lol people love the whole tension of permadeath, as in roguelike, thisgame simply dosnt have any real advertisement, people dont know about the game, i also found this only by CHANCE.

[Potjeh]

IMO the game is still too incomplete to go really heavy on advertising.

[Khors]

Plymouth

Is that seriously the population of this game?

Probably. The game is at a cross-roads between alpha and beta for one thing. In addition, Salem wont appeal to the hordes of gaming kids that have grown up with a socialist themepark mindset from titles/producers/developers that balance out power through entitlements, handouts and constraints. So Salem will probably cater to more independent / individualism-minded, game-play freedom-appreciate folks, as the game does get more exposure. And the types of sandboxy appreciative mmo folks are a smaller population of the overall mmo enthusiast pie.

[MagicManICT]

That reminds me of an article I just read, Khors. It was from a year or so ago by a programmer on Guild Wars 2. His opinion was that nobody could make an MMO with a staff of less than 100 and a budget of under 50 million. It'd never be successful unless it had a million players or some ridiculous number. You could see evidence of comments to the contrary that had been removed from the blog.

Just remember: it's not the player count that is important but the income vs cost. When you have a dev team of two, you don't need tens or hundreds of thousands of players to make a profit.

Also remember: seeing other people in game can be the death of you. It's something to be avoided unless you're somewhere secure or are confident in your ability to fight or run.

[Darwoth]

i have played ultima online emulators that were rocking 1500+ players at peak, had more server stability than the official servers and cost virtually nothing to run so that programmer is an idiot.

[matt3206]

You have to wonder about that server status player count how many of those players are actually just alts/mules?

[dmdisco]

and how many are not on at that very moment, but are still active in the game.