[Mzyxptlk]

Protecting your planet while you're away from the game is already covered by hiding your fleet. Your roids are far less important. If you're away for, say, a week, you'll continue to be able to mine all of your roids for several days (if you haven't been greedy), then mine a reduced number for the remaining time (after you inevitably get roided). Afterwards, you'll have few roids left, yes, but this also protects you from incomings, allowing you to get back up to size fairly quickly, without having to worry about being attacked.

On a wider scale, entering vacation mode does not actually help anyone else, either. While you're safe in Hawaii, your enemies' fleets will still fly, except now they will hit other planets in your alliance or galaxy. Those planets are more valuable because they are active, unlike yours. All else being equal, it's actually better to keep your planet out of vacation mode and let yourself get roided than it is to enter vacation mode, taking valuable income from you alliance, and redirecting incomings to your friends.

Evidence of this can be seen when you look at the mid-round abuse scenario. Even fat, high ranked planets that enter vacation mode right before they get incomings are hurt more by entering vacation mode than by staying out of it. I was always happy to see a target enter vacation mode before we could get to it. We would still fly out, except on a different target, essentially killing 2 birds with 1 stone. And we'd still get to go back to our original target 3 days later.


Note that the abuse scenario near round end is very different. For that night, you can avoid heavy incomings by entering vacation mode for just a few ticks. This flips the balance, and even if we do keep vacation mode, it should be impossible to be in vacation mode for less than 72 hours. I described 2 fairly simple mechanisms in my previous post.