[Mzyxptlk]

Stop telling me how to play the game, I'm perfectly capable of deciding that for myself, be happy I'm actually doing it in the first place. More players equals a better game, regardless of what those players are doing with their planet. In fact, I'm going to repeat that, as it's a fairly fundamental aspect of my argument:

More players equals a better game, regardless of what those players are doing with their planet.

I'll explain why, because I think many don't actually realise this any more, if they ever did. PA has two major aspects, which supplement each other: gameplay and community spirit. I think PA's strength lies in the community aspect of the game, not in the gameplay itself, but nevertheless, let's look at the gameplay aspect first.

There is a finite number of strategies for players to use. Recent game developments (government and population are two aspects that deserve mentioning) as well as a certain group of players (no, I'm not talking about Ascendancy, although some of us are definitely part of this group) thinking up new strategies (xp whoring, support planets, cov ops, distwhoring) have increased this number significantly over the last few rounds, but this has resulted in few fundamental changes in both gameplay and player thought patterns (Greenhills grabbing #1 was an exception to this rule).

In my opinion the gameplay aspect will never fundamentally change much, if at all, thus improvements to PA should come from the other aspect of the game: the community.

Changing an existing community is almost impossible, especially if that community is as abstract and hard to reach as the one we have in PA. Let's face it, we're not exactly the most ordinary bunch of people. The easiest way (and quite possibly the only realistic way) to improve an existing community is by adding people to it, people with different habits, different norms, different values, which makes the oldtimers less influential. This becomes especially significant when the number of newcomers outgrows the number of oldtimers, which is easy in a small community such as ours, and even more so when (not if) they start doing as well as us, or even outperform us. So what we need is a larger community.

This conclusion is actually nothing new, we've known this for ages. However, I felt the reason for this need for growth has been forgotten somewhat over time, which in turn was the reason I felt the above part of my post was necessary. Next up, how do we make PA grow?

We all know PA Team and Jolt don't have the time and will (respectively) to advertise Planetarion, and there's been no reason (at least no reason that gave us instant results, we may not be ordinary, but we're as short-sighted and selfish as the next guy) for the player base to recruit a significant number of people. And even if they could/wanted to invest in advertisement, ads and other marketing schemes are becoming increasingly useless in general, and particulary on the internet. In contrast, the invention of viral marketing is probably the single largest development in marketing strategies in a long time, because it combines effectiveness with low (close to non-existant) cost. With viral marketing, neither PA Team nor Jolt will need to put any effort or money into attracting more people to the game, they simply give people an incentive to recruit people to the game.

And what better incentive for a HC to get more people in the game than the fact that his alliance is losing the round because the opponent has more? In this case, supply creates demand. Less places in the few alliances means less people can play in a decent one means less people play. And don't tell me that (lower) alliance limits results in the creation of more alliances, the number of HCs won't grow until the number of players grows, and even then only with a significant delay, people don't become HC material overnight. Alliances will want to recruit as many people as they can handle, simply because more people = more score = better chance of winning.

On the other hand, having (and keeping!) a lot of people in your alliance is not as easy as people make it seem, thus leadership skills are going to be much more important than they would be if you limited every alliance to 50 or even less members, down to sizes which my dog would be capable of leading.

By removing this one rule they've solved their marketing problem. It will result in an immediate and noticable benefit for HCs when they recruit people, which in turn changes the community by making it bigger, which in turn makes the game better, which in turn makes more people want to play it.

I realise that there's a ceiling to the number of people that'd want to play this game, and that it's probably lower than it was 5 years ago. I however also believe that the ceiling is much higher than the 1500 people we now have, one only needs to look at games like Travian and Utopia to realise this is true.