The sony account won't let me post on the official forums. I played on Bonny at launch for about 1.5 months. I kind of liked the game, but left for reasons that I'm sure have been discussed ad nauseum. I see that they merged the servers, and Bonny is no more. I used to play with a guild called Represailles, a bunch of mature guys. They seem to no longer exist as well. I did a couple of port battles and that was pretty fun.

So I don't know. How's the game now? Is the population better now that there are fewer servers? Thinking about coming back and rolling deep in the econ stuff. Is the auction system better now? Does avatar combat suck less?

I'm keeping my eye on that Darkfall game too, which will either be a joke or the sleeper MMO of the millenium.

Originally posted by ZeyaVisuddha

I'm keeping my eye on that Darkfall game too, which will either be a joke or the sleeper MMO of the millenium.

Yes, but which millennium? 

More seriously, as far as PotBS is concerned, you should have access to the Winback program if you left in March, which gives you two weeks of free play using your old account.  I'll take advantage of this myself, once I'm done with the few years' worth of downloads to get the game up-to-date (hell, Darkfall might have released before it's over).

Havohej can probably give you more details, but he often mentions the fun is on Antigua and Blackbeard these days.

Antigua and Blackbeard are the highest populated servers and hes right about the winback and yes avatar combat has improved for the better IMHO, also as for downloading I had the same issues with it taking forever; So i recommended the station launcher for updating/patching etc its much faster and reliable.

The society my main is in (Nine Winds - Pirates on Antigua) has a lot of ex-Bonny folks.

Antigua isn't the RP haven that I've heard Bonny used to be... such a haven doesn't really exist at the moment so if you're into roleplaying you have to make your own fun where you can.

I find the populations to be fine on Blackbeard and Antigua (like Vetarnias said I'd say :P) but I can't speak for Roberts or Defiant... all reports say Rackham is a ghost town (though the Rack forum has a few holdouts saying "everything is okay"... guess it depends on what you consider to be okay, maybe those guys are antisocial and don't like a lot of people lol.

The new AvCom has only been around for a week or so, and so I haven't really decided if I like it more now than I did before... I wasn't a fan of AvCom previously though, and it certainly seems to speed things up on basic PvE. The animations are smoother, now. All in all, I don't DISlike it.

Econ is about to see some big changes (removal of LSB insurance wewt!) that hopefully will create a deflationary effect and make things easier for "the little guy" and the big societies all at once... but it has the potential to backfire horribly. I'm guardedly optimistic.

Rack is a ghost town compared to Blackbeard and Antigua,

Oh I wasn't a RP'er on Bonny. Although the RP people would end up in the pre-port-battle command room "in character", for better or worse. As the French we were barely able to field a decently sized resistance (usually fending off a British attack on a port). Population was so unbalanced, as I'm sure it still is right? (Pirates === British >> French > Spanish).

I stopped playing at the end of the first 1.5 month, even though I had paid for 3, lol. Quit after both my RL friends stopped. I was looking for that niche but didn't find it. I figure a few months of polish/fixes and server consolidation would have helped. So there are 3 American servers now, one of which is "a ghost town"? Hmm.

So what do you guys love about the game? I'm almost a fish out of water because I usually like PvE and crafting in my MMOs, but all the MMOs today seem to beat the PvP drum, which isn't exactly what I want. I guess I'm old school. (Loving Fallout 3 at the moment by the way.) Maybe I can come back to Pirates and roll a Freetrader instead of Naval Officer this time and focus on trade.

There are no "American" servers or "Euro" servers - they never enforced server geography. The way things are right now, there are servers set up with Port Battle scheduling windows and people from both sides of the Atlantic (plus Australia and wherever else in the world people play from) roll on whatever server's PB time slot best suits their "prime time" play schedule.

Regarding nation balance, someone posted before that Brits and Pirates will always be the largest populations because of their cultural weight (from Hornblower to Nelson to Morgan to Sparrow). Once new players realize that there's no real difference aside from the distribution of natural resources among the Old World factions (or in the case of Pirates, that the Brethren aren't the best choice for people who care about RvR), they tend to re-roll to France or Spain. But yes, Brits and Rats are (and probably always will be) bigger populations.

And to answer your last question, I personally play for two reasons: PvP and I like most of the people in my society. If they all left the game, I'd stay for the PvP and to see how things develop.