Seeing other players in Open Play - hardly anyone?

Armante

Armante
So throughout the Betas and Gamma I mostly played in Solo. Most of my gaming is in single player full stop, so it seemed the natural thing to do. Now that we're launched I thought I'd drop into Open Play and see what it's like to have other Commanders around. Only - there aren't any?

Okay, I thought, I'm in the middle of nowhere, I'll just make a series of jumps to Eranin. It's close, a lot of us started there (again and again) in beta. When I got there, I saw ONE Commander. All the other signals on the radar were solid. The next night I made a run to Lave, thinking that would be reasonably popular seeing as it's a historic station for the old timers among us. And again, only ONE other real human player.

I'm wondering why this is? I've read about someone hanging around outside of Eranin protecting new players from ganking by playerkillers picking on noobs. Which makes me thing there must be plenty of players in that instance.
As I understand it we're not connecting to central servers in the US and Europe, but sharing info via p2p and it matchmakes connections so players show up in the same instances and can interact.

Now here's the thing - I'm in New Zealand. If I play at my lunchtime on a Saturday, it is approximately midnight in the UK, 6pm Friday to 3pm across the USA. Does me being all the way on the other side of the planet mean I see less of other players? Is it trying to matchmake me with players in Asia, Australia and New Zealand?

I'd love some feedback on how it works, and what I can do to improve the odds of seeing other players! :D

EDIT: I have checked when I pause it does in fact say 'Open' and not Solo mode.
 
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Cmdr Ig

C
I'm in the UK and frankly was finding it pretty rare to see folk - I was beginning to wonder if somehow my internet connection, while a lovely high capacity cable affair, was somehow s***listing me on the matchmaking. On launch night, hunting near Cosi, I bumped into one player and had a chat - he was raving about the entertainment of watching all the newbies in Cosi, but I'd seen none, and I'd been there often enough that night. I even looked at the Cosi shipping stats, and there were thousands of ships through the system according to that. Frustrated, I upped sticks and chased onionhead, saw no one there either, traipsed the onion head all the way to Eranin after probably reading the same post as you (I liked the idea of joining in the defence of the new flock), finding that also stragely quiet, then Eranin Whisky to Lave - Bam! I ran into a ton of folk in CD something or other. And then last night, I managed, briefly, to catch up with this Kate lass that's twitching each night and found the posse that's escorting her around.

So you can find the players, but yeah, even in the right time zone, it seems peculiarly hard to do. I do remember one night of Beta where my scanner was full with PC, and I thought that was what launch night would be like, but no luck so far. It doesn't matter hugely, I'm still having fun, but I would like the busy systems to be, well, busy...
 

Hypermaniak

H
Armante said:
So throughout the Betas and Gamma I mostly played in Solo. Most of my gaming is in single player full stop, so it seemed the natural thing to do. Now that we're launched I thought I'd drop into Open Play and see what it's like to have other Commanders around. Only - there aren't any?

Okay, I thought, I'm in the middle of nowhere, I'll just make a series of jumps to Eranin. It's close, a lot of us started there (again and again) in beta. When I got there, I saw ONE Commander. All the other signals on the radar were solid. The next night I made a run to Lave, thinking that would be reasonably popular seeing as it's a historic station for the old timers among us. And again, only ONE other real human player.

I'm wondering why this is? I've read about someone hanging around outside of Eranin protecting new players from ganking by playerkillers picking on noobs. Which makes me thing there must be plenty of players in that instance.
As I understand it we're not connecting to central servers in the US and Europe, but sharing info via p2p and it matchmakes connections so players show up in the same instances and can interact.

Now here's the thing - I'm in New Zealand. If I play at my lunchtime on a Saturday, it is approximately midnight in the UK, 6pm Friday to 3pm across the USA. Does me being all the way on the other side of the planet mean I see less of other players? Is it trying to matchmake me with players in Asia, Australia and New Zealand?

I'd love some feedback on how it works, and what I can do to improve the odds of seeing other players! :D
Click to expand...

All through beta I saw players all the time in the 'Pill' and even before that.

Since Gamma 1.0 I have not seen ONE single real player. I play every day, all sorts of times. Never seen a player. I have been in Sol and surrounding system all day today (a Saturday) - no players. I went to the Onionhead world (Kappa Fonacis) on launch day and stayed there several days, went to the warzone - not a single player.

And NO I AM NOT IN SOLO MODE and only went to solo mode a few times just to check maybe my menu had it the wrong way round and everyone was really in Solo lol :)

So what the hell is wrong? Something is, but I don't know what. I am based in Asia but I have played almost every hour of the 24 hour clock on every day of the week.

Beta - lots of players all the time.
Gamma and Release - none, ever, anywhere I go; not matter what day of the week or what time of day.
 
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Altissimus

A
Beta - 4 systems, a few thousand players.

Release - 400,000,000,000 systems, a few hundred thousand players.

Could be a contributing factor?
 

Kicks

Kicks
I'm in Lugh, I know there are players there and should be quite a few... One night I saw none. Zero. Zip. Next night, 5 in SC, but none in any stations/outposts. Feels a little lonely!
 

Cmdr Ig

C
certainly, I wholly expect people to be spread out. My concern was that there were all these reports of people seeing all the Sideys in the starter systems, getting interdicted left right and centre by player pirates, struggling with griefers, and I seemed to see one person a night if I was lucky in a starter system that supposedly was seeing thousands of ships passing through. Moving around I now know I can bump into people, particularly near Lave, but it did seem odd that Cosi was so dead for me, and yet alive for others.
 

Armante

Armante
Altissimus said:
Beta - 4 systems, a few thousand players.

Release - 400,000,000,000 systems, a few hundred thousand players.

Could be a contributing factor?
Click to expand...

Absolutely. But then I thought Eranin and Lave systems would be popular. Sol's the same, so it doesn't quite add up.

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Cmdr Ig said:
certainly, I wholly expect people to be spread out. My concern was that there were all these reports of people seeing all the Sideys in the starter systems, getting interdicted left right and centre by player pirates, struggling with griefers, and I seemed to see one person a night if I was lucky in a starter system that supposedly was seeing thousands of ships passing through. Moving around I now know I can bump into people, particularly near Lave, but it did seem odd that Cosi was so dead for me, and yet alive for others.
Click to expand...

Exactly this. Maybe they need to keep tweaking the code, or it's something to do with some of us being physically located on far-flung sides of the planet. I'd love some input from the FD devs on this one.
 

Altissimus

A
Cmdr Ig said:
certainly, I wholly expect people to be spread out. My concern was that there were all these reports of people seeing all the Sideys in the starter systems, getting interdicted left right and centre by player pirates, struggling with griefers, and I seemed to see one person a night if I was lucky in a starter system that supposedly was seeing thousands of ships passing through. Moving around I now know I can bump into people, particularly near Lave, but it did seem odd that Cosi was so dead for me, and yet alive for others.
Click to expand...

There were patch notes addressing use of instances to increase likelihood of player encounters. Perhaps, before this was recently implemented, you had been in your own instance in crowded space as a result of internet randomness - your location, bandwidth, whatever.

Just a theory.
 

Kicks

Kicks
Armante said:
Absolutely. But then I thought Eranin and Lave systems would be popular. Sol's the same, so it doesn't quite add up.
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Exactly. I don't think it is necessary to compare player-coutn to the 400,000,000,000 systems when the vast majority will be in the inhabited systems or nearby. Even the die-hard for-profit explorers are going to come back to the populated systems to sell their data. There'll always be pockets of players at the systems you mention, and GalNet will create other pockets of choice.
 

Tinman

Tinman
It all depends on where you go.

I was also wondering if there was something up with the matchmaking since Gamma started. Then I went to the starter systems (around LHS 3447)...players everywhere. Not only that...the experience was also a lot smoother than previously. :)

More and more people have also started to involve themselves in the story events mentioned on GalNet. So these systems also have quite a number of players around them at times.
 
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Hypermaniak

H
Vicis said:
Wait, wait, wait!

This is an online game!?!?!?!?!?
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Yeah, the forums give me that impression too...as I keep reading about all these people meeting eachother in places like Lugh, Sol, Eranin, Lave, Kappa Fornacis.

But I guess they are all really "using their imagination" to make it seem like it has lots of real players.

You know, just blazing their own trails. ;)
 

crushdepth

C
I see a few around, but I'm surprised not to see many at Sorbago. Would have thought people would be coming in to follow the storyline.
 

Adept

Adept
I see people all the time, enough to make me a little nervous. I'm not interested in PvP, especially at the time, and whrn I see 4 other commanders buzzing in super cruise, i keep an eye on them, and prepare to fight an interdiction.

Nobody has tried to mess with me yet though.
 

Hypermaniak

H
Sorry I respectfully disagree - I have been to all these so-called 'frequented' systems. I never see anyone, ever, no matter what time of day it is or what day of the week it is.

I bought the game to play online with others, I might as well play Solo (which for me means I may as well not play it).

There is a massive difference between Beta - there were players throughout the Pill (2400+ systems) - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=52242

Since Gamma, I see none and yet when I check Galnet Traffice Reports in these frequented systems it reports sometimes thousands of ships in the last 24 hours - THOUSANDS, they can't all be NPC's.

Something does not add up.
 

Kicks

Kicks
Hypermaniak said:
Since Gamma, I see none and yet when I check Galnet Traffice Reports in these frequented systems it reports sometimes thousands of ships in the last 24 hours - THOUSANDS, they can't all be NPC's.

Something does not add up.
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I agree, something doesn't add up - I think the P2P mechanics still need some TLC. I'm confident we'll get there but you, I, and a good number of others aren't seeing many (or any, in some cases) other players. And that traffic report counts only players (did some experiments with this).
 
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