One more PS--the game has always been bigger than the player base. I mean, there aren't enough login slots to support ~30 NPC factions, so some of the factions have always been dead.
That's the wrong way to look at it though. Number of empty factions or systems does not matter; the thing we care about it is the number of systems that have player activity.
For example if 200 players are spread over 5 systems then the game feels more active than if 200 players are spread over 20 systems. It does not matter if there are 200 empty systems, since we don't look for other players in empty systems. Right now everybody is exploring and tooling around so they are spread out over the whole map. We will see if they come back to 5 systems or 20 systems
Point is that a large number of empty systems don't affect anything
![[Image: smuggler-threat-0-1.jpg]](http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x57/UrsusMorologus/Freelancer%20Discovery/smuggler-threat-0-1.jpg)