Among the regulars at least, I don't see all that many people suddenly leaving a game or going afk for no reason... it is incredibly rude when it happens though.

Still, sometimes people get minidumps, and from what I've heard they've gotten more common recently (where the player's game crashes, they leave the game, and nothing can be done about it).

The active players online that I've seen very rarely suddenly stop playing or leave the game for no reason. That said, there are a good amount of newer players online who do this, which is a problem - but it's a problem with them, associated with being new, and is not a serious problem for the community as a whole or with the regulars.

The biggest problem is still that 99+% of all Sins players never logged on.  Then about 70% of those that do only play against the AI instead of playing real games.

Fully agreed with myfist0.

My games against AI are just as real as yours.

If you carefully craft maps you can get some exceptionally good results from the AI--but it does lack the nuance of a human and is hard to balance/predict.

I've been playing since sins vanilla, so im not new to the game, and I enjoy my AI games. Often me and my friend LAN against AI where we team up, wipe them all out, then go against eachother. But usually I play AI matches by myself with DS mod or Sins of the Fallen, or the star trek mod, and I enjoy myself. 

I don't need to play an asian kid in chess to enjoy the game.

edit: Though, on second thought I realize I tend to take a more RP element to it. when I play, I play as the leader of a space faring faction, not as a player with a mouse and keyboard.

I love the mind-bending that I can engage in on ICO, when I can fool ignorant noobs into thinking that I'm going to attack them, and then flank them or expand without worries...

^^Okay, now that there was a lie, I'm not a troll on ICO, I haven't even ever flamed anyone to my memory, and I haven't ever quit out unless everyone on my team agreed to it. Just because there exist people who are poor sports doesn't mean that everyone is... (I do have to admit that I have met people who aren't the nicest, and they completely wreck the game by quitting out or spamming or some other wasteful strategy, but I've been fortunate enough to meet only a few...)

I think that if we had a larger community on these forums, and some more clan activity, we might have a chance of bringing ICO back, and a better chance of teaching noobish players how to survive...

I'm sure that Rebellion will bring a large amount of old players back to the game and pump ICO population numbers.

I also believe that I've had a better ICO experience than most other people have.

Little known fact: what you think of as the single player game is just a figment of your imagination. It might seem like you're moving your mouse and pressing keys and whatnot, but none of it is actually happening. Your mind creates the illusion of a game, that you then imagine you interact with. It's like Inception . This is not the case with multiplayer, because when two or more real, live humans imagine the same thing it becomes real. This only happens with humans, and cannot occur if you replace one with a computer. Hence DirtySanchezz's assertion that playing against the AI is not "real." This effect is known as the Multiplayer BS Reality Theory.

Of course, one could probably make the argument that playing against the opponent that the developers programmed into the game is real because you're actually playing against the game. One could also say that declaring one part of the game to be more "real" than the other is just as stupid as the AI. They could even go so far as to say that that kind of attitude is doing more to hurt the already pitiful ICO player counts than help them.

I didn't mean to say that people who only play against AI aren't actually playing a game.  I just meant to say that it isn't a "real" game because their AI opponents are retarded.  It just doesn't seem like much of a game when your opponents are retarded and commit suicide for you and do other silly non-strategic things.

Games rarely take longer than an hour to be decided, at which point the losing side very often surrenders so they can get on with their life or play a different match.

You have to decide what's important to you--the quality of the game you're playing or the benefits of playing offline.  What good is the reliability of playing single player offline if the game doesn't offer a strategic challenge?  Over time hundreds of players have concluded that having to put up with occasional minidumps and scheduling bathroom breaks between games is worth it in order to be able to enjoy a game of strategy.

Also, note that the PvP games don't take anywhere close to 6 hours to play and normally take no longer than 2 hours with most games ending between 1:15-1:30.  (If a game does go longer, it's probably a good one.)  How is that possible?  Unlike when you play against 9 AI opponents in a 1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1, in a 5v5 or 4v4 you don't have to kill the other 5 or 4 players single-handed.  Instead, you have teammates for that.  It would take a couple hours if every last losing team planet had to be bombed out.  Instead players on the losing team call it "gg" (good games) and quit so that a new game can start, sparing the winning team of having to go through the boring motions of mopping up.  

A large number of people that play the Sins single-player are similar play times to Sword of the Stars, Galactic Civilizations, Total War, where you can hop in, play for a bit, then just leave and come back to it later. In all of these games it is hard to get a sustained multi-player experience either in a short amount of times or spread out over many sessions with 'match-making' lobbies etc.

*shrugs* It's life for half the people that play Sins.

You start to see more players on ICO if there were various ammounts of different game styles on ICO.

And not just map sizes, playing on normal speeds and such would help draw in some of the non SC2 RTS-style players. A large chunk of SINS demograph is/was Turn-based/4x gamers. Catering to all types of players never hurts a community.