Playerbase is rather small, but it seems there's some growth recently. Hopefully this will change quite bit if the game turns out to be somewhat of a success on Steam Greenlight. Currently during weekends both major guilds (Utopie and Avarice) have enough players to about fill a raid for Eclipse (although Utopie usually has around 20-22). There're also two smaller guilds present NWA for Empire and Void for League.
Hard to tell which one is the weaker faction, past two weeks Utopie (Empire) did slightly better than Avarice (League) in Dominion as Avarice had some changes/problems with leadership - I guess they could tell you more about that. Before that Avarice seemed to do better than Utopie, both in raids and dominion. Currently we're almost equal, but that can quickly change.
Leveling part is easy, catching up with gear is a bit harder. Luckily the next week's patch will just help you to do that (6.0.1 on Thursday). From what I know, previous sectors you can visit without wasting Astral Keys, so gearing to a quite decent level shouldn't be an issue. Also in those sectors Astral Replicators should grant 4 times the loot, which makes catching up even easier to do.
I'm sure both major guilds will help you get the rubies from the raids they can clear, so that shouldn't be an issue either. Getting enough free trader coins as a brand new player could prove to be somewhat difficult or at least the lengthy process, but I'd say it's certainly not too hard to catch up now - assuming you invest quite a bit of free time.
Links to the two major guilds:
Avarice -
http://avarice.host.allvatar.com/
Utopie -
http://utopie-allods.forumactif.org/
Both Avarice and Utopie is active during EU hours, that includes raid times - something that's worth to keep in mind if you're from NA.
Other than that there's NWA, a smaller guild on Empire side (mostly seems EU) and Void on the League (mostly NA, I believe).
Edit: Sorry, got the wrong link for Avarice apparently. Fixed it and I'll get to punishing my spies right away.