Personally I like a croud, but not tomuch so you are not strugling to get a bloody gun!

I vote 5-8, the map don't really like more.

"merrier" btw..

I suck horribkly if the player count gets over 6-7, dunno why.

It's because you are focused on playing on a single person, when you are with a large amount of peaple you have to focus on a group, keep your ass alive while trying to inflict damage on a single target, and pickuping up health to have some reserve when more then one person shoots at you, and keeping an eye on anyone trying to shoot on you

I also sucked horrible, but these days I tend to get on top of the case ...

i agree, most of the maps doesn't support more than 5-8 players if you want good gameplay and not just everybody running around shotgunning their way through. since there is little or no point in trying to pick up a weapon. I've speculated a bit about why people only join the one server with lots of players on it. instead of just joining an empty server as it doesn't take long before people start joining. with the number of servers we now have available we really ought to fan out a bit to allow better gameplay.

I like 1-3, 3 being the ideal for me.
I like more strategic gameplay that is very much possible with anything less then 5ish (depending on the map)
Wack them all can be fun, but it's just gibbs all around, no-one-knows-what's-going-on type of play.