Is anyone else playing this? I was talking ot a developer when I started playing, and they said they had 1500 new players sign up after being on Reddit. I dabbled in the first one, but the restrictive subscription model was just too much. Now they have loosened it up a little and allow F2P players to advance much further. I am having a good time in this one. It is pretty much just like EvE but with twitch combat.

Sorry for the long delay until i made an account on here :P. I already had one, but its linked to an email that doesn't exist anymore heh. Had to use this username instead. 

What we called the "redditvasion" was something that happened after some post about Star Sonata made it to the hot topic front page on reddit. There plain simply was too many new players at once the nexus area was not made to cope with such quantity and a lot of quick changes had to be done to make it work. Although as expected not many of those 2000+ new account actually stayed. 

Star Sonata  "p2p" or premium accounts qty has seen very little changes over the past few years (which is a shame but not dramatic, there are enough to keep the game running and some more). On the other end, the ammount of unique players has increased dramatically over the last 2 years. We are currently averaging at a little over 3000 unique ip connecting to the live server every week. 

It is nothing massive compared to a lot of big mmo's around. but its enough to ensure the game will not disapear anytime soon ;). 

As you stated, the free to play part of the game was greatly increased with the release of Star Sonata 2, You can actually play for free for well over a few months before reaching the point where you begin considering the need for a subscription. And even so, there is generally still a lot you can do as a free player at that point. (level 2000, tech level 19 out of 21 in most skills and some end game zones are not accessible but thats about it)

There is a pretty wide difference between older and newer players yes. Nobody can deny that, but it is also part of what star sonata is. What you do in star sonata has "importance and consequences" in the universe, your character is permanent and that apply to old players just as well as new players. On the other hand, old players generally try to not meddle in new players business unless the new player start it (except in a few pirates cases, but those generally dont exist that long, since preying on old players is all good and fine, but attacking new players / lowbies for no valid reasons is shunned by the playerbase).  

Yes, you can join a big team and litterally "skip" most of the mid game, but personally, i never liked that idea. I don't mind it at all if you do it so you can play with your friend (your friend is higher, and therefor help you reach a point where you can play together), but just joining a top team for the sake of skipping content give you nothing short of reaching the end game faster (which in turn, mean youll run out of things to do faster).