Contest: 200 for the 200

[majkp]

I'm sorry to burst your balloon, but that record has already been broken. When I get online with Freelancer, I check to see how many players are on the servers where I have characters. If I'm playing Discovery, I'll check how many players are on the vanilla servers before I toggle the settings to limit the display to Discovery servers. I've recently noticed increasing activity on the Jolt.co.uk vanilla server, possibly due to server events. Many times they have few players, but I've seen them maxed out at 50/50 and within the last two weeks I was amazed once to see Jolt.co.uk maxed out at 128/128. I didn't take a screen shot of it, because I hadn't read this thread, so I didn't know it was that significant an achievement. If I recall correctly, I used to see numbers that high on a regular basis on a few servers back in 2004-2005, including the raw vanilla server and the Armageddon Evolutions server, both servers where I had characters.

http://stats.freelancerserver.de/

Check the graph for Jolt.co.uk on the Top 5 server activity chart, does that seem like a regular freelancer server behavior when compared to other large servers? I don't think so. I went through the forums of the biggest servers and so far 118 really is the record. But I may be wrong, of course and maybe the Jolt.co.uk serves for a really large group of players who all start playing FL at the same time, no matter that it's 5 am in the morning and next day is a work/school day...