What's wrong with this game? A marketing failure?
What version of the game are you playing? Regular/Vanilla Sins and the Entrenchment expansion server are pretty dead. The action is on the separate Diplomacy expansion server
If U.S. Eastern time is GMT -5, then GMT +7 must be...Australia? So 5:00 pm GMT +7 is the equivalent of...about 5:00 am in the morning U.S. Eastern time. Yeah, the game would be pretty dead at that time. Try again between, say, 4:00-8:00 am Australia time. (It's the curse of being a Sins player Downunda. You're not alone in suffering from that, by the way.)
That having been said, the player counts are the Diplomacy server aren't particularly high either and will only tend to get up to, say, 80 people during North Amercain prime time. However, this game is awesome for online multiplayer PvP and there are still several 4v4 and 5v5 (no AI) games every night. You may have to wait a little bit, keeping your game in Windows mode so you can surf while you wait, but it's worth it.
In case you're wondering about the player counts, for some reason this game just never appealed to the RTS online multiplayer PvP crowd, or maybe they were just too busy playing Starcraft and the like to learn about Sins. Sadly, 99% of all Sins players only ever played it offline in single player against AI and then many of the people who do come online only play comp stomps with their friends. This game also had some technical issues (mostly long-since fixed) that hampered online multiplayer. Hopefully huge amounts of new people will get into the online multiplayer scene when Rebellion comes out, but the online multiplayer aspects will need to be brilliantly polished.
