Right now I have a RL friend I play with on and off, but we're both working and just turned 21. So I have been running solo for the majority of the time thus far. As well, if the lag issues hadn't been hotfixed I was close to giving up on Brink's online gameplay.
As far as Class/Rank goes: I'm working on hitting rank 5 on my soldier (mostly played with bots, some online exp for the 20% bonus when I could tolerate the lag). After that I intend on starting up a new character from scratch and speccing into medic or operative.
My Gamertag is SageWut, feel free to toss me a friend request or reply here as I intend on checking back on this thread later for any like-minded clans or folks that would just like a buddy to party up with every now and then.
btw, my faction preference so far is Security