You never mentioned whether you dropped in on RK1 or RK2. Population is certainly down. That's for certain. In response to low population, FC has decided that it would be a good idea to set up new hardware and move all of the RK1 and RK2 populations to that new server. Their hopes that the combined ...
Quite a bit, Yes. I doubt you'd find that many things in the Veteran shop to actually want to buy. The recall beacons are the only things that are truly useful.
Welcome back. For expansions players, pistol is a perfectly viable option. As you approach end-game you might consider pistol + smg (if you like lots of special attacks) as IP becomes plentiful. I think the current max-damage expansions soldier set up is dual Xan SMGs. I don't have any first hand ex...
The global map is difficult to use for locating things -- that's what the playfield map is for. If you use AoRK, if you look carefully, it does have grid lines, but they are like every 1,000 or 500. However, here's what I do to find stuff: Zone into (in your example) Clondyke. press shift-F9 to get ...