I started checking AP1 in addition to AP33. I always knew there were heroes standing vigil there, was just saving myself one extra zone load.
The numbers of people standing vigil is I think slowly trending upward. I can see some pretty clear examples of a server where one heroes resolutely standing out there for days on end is slowly drawing attention and recruiting additional people.
The raw numbers do not tell the whole story. On several of these servers, I've seen the same person standing there now for several days running, and now he's got people with him. That is one reason I created 3 more accounts and am parking them in low population servers.
Another thing that is not obvious from these numbers is how much impact even a spontaneous event on the server has on the number of people standing vigil. Any time someone calls out that they are doing a flash mob or a CC over the SaveCOH channel, I pop over to join in. Since most of my toons are now parked in AP for Vigil duty if I am not actively playing them, I always get a glance at the vigil action both on arrival and when I relog to someone else. There is ALWAYS a bigger crowd for a while after any SaveCOH event that generates a lot of chat on a server.
Oh yes, another observation worth editing in. I am seeing more and more people use some variant of the idea of putting up an explanation of what they are doing using /afk. Most of them say simply "save our City of Heroes" or something along those lines. Only a few so far are including a link, but that idea seems to be spreading, too. I need to swing by the official forums and suggest people go AFK rather than logout if they can spare the computer to do so.
Here's a link to a consolidated table of the numbers I've gathered. Will try to swing through all servers once a day and keep this updated.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnJyUcNZYr_EdEx2VVgtbkdDYjJUNFRWbmxTT0tZdkE#gid=0
