I can definitely relate to your low-pop server woes. Our server is even lower-population, after a small number of extremely toxic individuals ran off everyone else but our Company. Daily PEAK population has been averaging 100 a day or less over the past couple weeks, even on weekend prime time. It’s really pitiful.
What happened on our server was, an invading Marauder coalition captured our town’s fort the first few days after Launch, before we’d gotten much of our player community up and running in the game. (I joined seven days after Launch, for example.) Because we and everyone were still so new, our Governor reached out for allies to help us retake our city. (Mind you, our Council members had very generously chipped in to several other Companies in our faction to help them buy a town too.) No support from within our faction was offered.
So, our Governor reached out to a Company in the third faction, both to help teach us the mechanics of this game’s Wars and to help us take our town back. Well, a handful of toxic people feigned outrage that our Company leader reached out to a Company in another faction to help us. (These are the same people we’d helped acquire their own cities, mind you! Ungrateful wretches…) Well, this was our first War, and as much as anything, our agreement with the other faction’s Company was to tap their best PvP player’s expertise in managing a War. (He’d run several such actions in Beta, apparently.)
But my goodness, the vitriol was immense! There was a handful of players who took it upon themselves to flame us all day, every day, for months, as “traitors to the (Faction)” and horrible people. Especially our leader. Their intent was to sabotage our reputation and make it impossible for us to recruit new members. “Don’t join them! They are toxic!” in a classic reversal move: accuse your enemies of the sins you are committing – and do it more loudly, and people who don’t know what’s really going on will believe you. Or just make stuff up. As long as you spread your lies loudly enough and long enough, it has the desired effect.
Ironically, we did manage to retake our town with that other Company’s help. A couple weeks later, the toxic people did the same thing they accused us of: a remnant of one of the toxic Companies in our faction split off and formed a new Company in a different faction, and recruited a larger Company in a third faction to run interference for them while they ran up Influence in our province to 100 percent, then used the support of a new group that was large enough from playing together in other games for years to flesh out their War roster, while the toxic people in our own faction refused to help us. And we lost our town.
Eventually, our former allies in the other faction (also abused mercilessly in Chat) left the server in disgust. Meanwhile, most of the players in the toxic players’ own Companies also left, apparently in disgust at the toxic players’ behavior, which included things like a Governor absconding with all the coin in his Company’s account and being welcomed with open arms into a rival Company, or people changing Company names repeatedly to make it harder for people to recognize them and their toxic history.
About 3 weeks ago, it finally dawned on the abusive remnant that the server didn’t even have enough people left to scrounge up a full roster for things like Corruption Invasions or Wars, and they started to play nice – with each other. But our Company was still the target of their malice, to the point that the only thing that brought out enough players for a full War roster was when we attempted to recapture our town (we were the original Company that bought the town back when the game first launched).
But that was last month. Since then, the population has continued to dwindle.
Current status is that they have all united into one Faction (ironically, OUR Faction, apparently in a deliberate move to protect themselves from us in things like open-world PvP or opposing them in their sham Wars: our leader is hands down the best PvPer on the server), and they are consolidating all the zones in unopposed Wars. They are fight-clubbing in Forts to run up Influence in territories (takes them about 30 minutes to get to full Influence), then staging sham wars to take the Forts under the banner of the single faction, with no one fighting on the defense. It’s a clear and massive abuse of the Faction system, and the War system in general. Reminds me of the Jedi “fight clubs” in Star Wars Galaxies back in the day, when lowbie Jedi and Bounty Hunters would congregate in a walled arena on the roof of a player-made house and indulge in PvP battles to give the Jedi participants easy XP. Several players used the exploit to rocket to Jedi Master in a month or so!
Sony Online Entertainment wound up issuing mass permabans for the practice. Dozens of “Jedi Masters” disappeared overnight.
But I digress.
At this point, it sounds like your character’s been permabanned, or at least suspended indefinitely. You fell for the classic schoolyard blunder: reacting in anger to a bully. I learned the lesson decades ago…
- A bully will pick a fight
- The target reacts and/or defends himself
- Teachers (or server admins in this case) never see the initial provocation, but the resulting commotion gets their attention
- The bully feigns innocence now that the teachers/admins’ attention has been drawn
- Only seeing the angry/violent reaction of the victim, the teachers/admins come down ON THE VICTIM, while the bully gets off scot-free.
In MMOs, this is a classic trolling sequence.
At this point, probably your best course of action is to appeal your ban and explain the circumstances.