When I first logged in, there were 386 people online. Hey, that's not bad at all considering how new the server is and how much more dead RO is these days.
What started to become suspicious was how the main town only ever had about 10~15 people in it at any one time. Well okay, everyone is out leveling, or in other areas. I asked about it in #main chat and people said that most people are just in other towns. Oh yes, the good old "guild town" thing that RO clans do.
Unfortunately that seemed to only make up, in total, about 30 more people online. In the designated vending area, there were in total 29 vendors.
Thus far we have less than 80 players accounted for. But, it's very fair to assume that most people are, you know, actually playing the game, so they wouldn't be sitting in a town doing nothing.
This is what I figured until I realized that the server population only ever fluctuated by 3~4 in my 4 hours of playtime yesterday. This is something that just doesn't happen. A server does not stay so close to the 382~386 population mark for such a long period of time. No matter, every server has its downtime, the hours that just aren't very good for an english speaking population.
The issue there is that the population, even then, had never went below 350 online. I have never ever seen a server that is so consistently populated 24 hours a day, yet with so many leveling areas being devoid of players, which leads me to believe that the population advertised isn't legitimate.