If the game actually manages to manifest all of their textual promises, what is your estimation of the amount of people who will play the game and the amount of servers they'll provide by the end of the year?

I was thinking somewhere around 1 million? With.. about 10 servers?

(do not stray from the topic or introduce another topic, as most always do)

I believe, and hope, that Aventurine will start with a couple of servers (EU & US), gauge the popularity of the game then add shards as the population grows thereafter, like EVE did through its history.

It'll be a mistake to try and estimate so early and waste money on servers before a stable population materializes. AoC and TR were good examples of that hype.

Depends how popular the game gets. Sigoya's ideas seem to be spot on with mine. But once again, just don't estimate too early!

100.000 players per server ? That'd have to be a monster server then.
If it delivers on all its promises, it can match probably rank up to a few million (simply because they promised a damn lot).

I agree with Sigoya though, if you end up on an virtually empty server it wont be much fun.

Nah, I think you guys are overestimating the number of people who like the hardcore environment that DF will have.

Within a month after launch there will be constant raids on the newbie of other factions. This will make it so people who guild up right away or come over in guilds are fine, but most others will get sick of it.

In addition Mortal Online is coming out this year (maybe) and it looks a heck of alot more polish so will probably eat into the crowd of 'I am waiting to see how AV turns around Darkfall' crowd.

We can probably expect eve or shadowbane numbers -- 50-60k within a year maybe up to a max of 80-100k

(plenty of subscribers to keep the game profitable, I'm sure)