No, this isn't me trying to make a clever pun. I mean there's nobody there. No human players. I spent almost 90 minutes in the Dreadnaught today doing Court of Oryx, patrols, activating runes, and completing bounties. In that time, I didn't see a single other player on patrol. I saw a couple fire teams run by on their way to a strike, but that was it.

Is this unusual? I rarely go to the Dreadnaught these days, so I don't have a strong idea of how much traffic is usually going through it. I ask because I need to do some Court of Oryx for the last calcified fragment, and I was planning to just jump in solo and hope to find a few randoms. But if it is this empty all the time, I might need to schedule something.

I think that makes sense, more and more people are probably done with most of the quests at this point.

I still don't have my exotic sword, so I've been thinking of setting up events to do it. Probably not a bad idea for you to set up events for your needs, too.

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What the others said is probably all true, but honestly I wonder if there were just some matchmaking/general network connectivity issues affecting you at the time. It's happened to nearly all of us now and then, where you're in the tower for example and there's just no one else there. It can happen if, for whatever reason, you're able to connect to Destiny's servers at the time but aren't getting matched with other people. Of course, the couple fireteams you did see make that less likely, but maybe that was just a temporary reprieve?

In my experience anyway. After the first month or so, I rarely encountered more than one other person in any given area. Even during the first month, there were way fewer players there than anywhere else I went on patrol.

It was a neat area to explore the first time; it is not a fun area to go back to repeatedly.

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Especially while I'm farming for Flakes. People come in and out and activates runes and whatnot.

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That's hilarious. I haven't played in over a month, but when I was still playing regularly, the Court of Oryx was the one place I was guaranteed to never see another soul. Seriously, I can count the number of times I've seen randos in the Court of Oyrx on one hand.

It's (almost) unappealing to go there. One single Flake at a time, barely anywhere to sit, that awful Founts place, only three areas to visit, and of course, don't forget the Dantalion in the room:

NO VEHICLES!!

Every time I have to Patrol the Dreadnaught, I start groaning. I don't feel that way about any other planet, even Mars--which I hate. That's a huge dealbreaker.

Robot Chickens pointed out to me that by making the player unable to use sparrows, the Dreadnaught feels much bigger. Bungie definitely wanted us to feel like the Dreadnaught was huge.

Yep. Honestly, it was big enough already--I mean, it is huge. Removing the sparrows was understandable of course--you're technically on a ship, after all--that doesn't make it any less groan-able.

I wish we had sparrows, too. Robot just helped me gain some perspective on why we probably don't have them.

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In theory, no one should notice that "no one is patrolling the hive ship" until the entire hive ship population drops to below 16, right? There are some ping issues that may be best to avoid, but otherwise the people in an area are ad hoc and can be combined as the numbers drop.

My guess is that you had a funny little networking glitch, and bunnies servers decided it was best you played on your own, or that Bungie failed to reevaluate your game state and have new players join you.

Why make us do that mission at the start on the sparrow going around where the portal thing is?..

Sparrows clearly can operate on the dreadnought. I think it might have more to do with the amount of open spaces/ possible glitches with those "special" chests.

No one wants to be spending half their time reviving in patrol after accidentally falling of some edge because you took it too wide. dreadnought SRL please!!!

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I don't recall a mission with sparrows on the dreadnaught either, can you elaborate?

Outside of fireteams, it's pretty obvious that people are grouped in clusters of 16 by geographical region. In fact, when we want to get more than 3 people into the Court of Oryx, it's easiest to have two people on the same network go to the Dreadnaught separately, the proximity of the IP addresses increases the chance of getting into the same cluster. That being said, it would be pretty easy to not have 16 people in your nearby geographical region, thus resulting in a ghost town cluster.

Also, because you can't guarantee what cluster people will be in and you can't force people to go to a particular zone to thus join a particular cluster, I think the scenario of having very few people in your zone is quite easily achievable. Thus resulting in the low population density of the Dreadnaught now.