How does online play work?

[l33t_haxx0r]

I have wanted to play this since launch but confused about how the online works, I heard it was servers for like 100 people and that it?

I wanna play in a persistent online server wit loads of people, I don't want to find a server, play for awhile and find either not being able to log in due to over population, or nobody else to play with or fight :D

can someone explain the system please? from the offset, just looks like day z

[Tachyon]

You won't find servers with 100 people. There are the Officials, but generally people avoid those like the plague so you'll have plenty of slots spare for new players. There are thousands and thousands of Unofficial servers, so the player-base is spread pretty thinly on those. Plenty of slots spare, usually, but some will be password protected and you can't join those.

[Lily Azure]

Official servers are fine to play (I play them) and a couple with healthy and helpful communities are 1520 and 1726. This is the game at its base configurations and I highly recommend new players play this way so that they may learn the game. We just had a round of Official servers close and the people there were merged into other servers, this is very rare and FC gave multiple warnings that a server was going to close.

Private or Unofficial servers are plentiful and almost all of them have mods that change the game from the base configuration. The mods while giving a lot of new and different content are prone to causing the server to not work for a day or two when the game updates occur. Also a lot of private servers want donations to keep the server going, and you never know when the server is just going to go away.

[Tachyon]

Originally posted by Lily Azure:

...and you never know when the server is just going to go away.

Bit like Funcom then. :D

[BigBombz]

I've played over 4500 hours on private servers, and based on my experience a private server stays up for a couple of months or maybe three before it's either wiped clean or shut down completely. At least that's true for PVP-servers.
PVE-servers may stay up longer but on them people eventually lose their interest and stop playing so that server gets empty after a while.
If you want long term secure server that won't disappear on you then official servers might be for you.
Max number of players online at the same time on officials is 40. There are usually couple of high populated servers per region, few others usually have 1-6 players and the rest are completely empty.

[Clail]

This isn't an MMO, which it sounds like is more of what you are looking for, though I personally don't recommend.

Most if not all survival games on the market are based on smaller servers. This helps give players room for resources, building, and the "survival experience." Maxed out servers on these games tends to result in a lot of griefing, resource blocking, and a generally bad experience for every one.

If for any reason you don't like the server you start on, you can transfer at any time every 7 days I believe.