Quote:
Originally Posted by BloodyButcher
So what does the farm ratio have to say when it comes to how much time needs to be invested in this game to be sucsefull?
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The farm ratio tells us something about how often allianceless planets get incs. If the number of alliance players (who attack every night) stays the same but the number of farms drops, then each farm gets more incs. That's an simplification, of course, but not an oversimplification, in my view.
That said, look at the numbers. We've gone from 1.14 to 0.71 over the past 35 rounds. Even if alliance players
only attack farms, all day, every day, then the amount of incs they get has only gone up by ~61%. That's a major change, but it's not 36 -> ~98 incs a round. The same is true for top or even lower tier alliances. The change your data shows is not a doubling or tripling of incs. It's just a minor increase.
What your data also does not show is how those incs are distributed. If most of them show up during a single week, then you have practically no chance of getting defense during that time. But that also means you get almost no incs for the other 6 weeks of the round, so you might come out ahead. On the other hand, if you get a small number of incs every day, the chance of getting defense is very good, but only if people wake up at night to send it. This, in my view, is PA's main problem today: to do well in PA, you need to organize your entire life around it. We aren't talking about sitting at your PC for 24/7 (not since the dawn of the smart phone), but we
are talking about staying up another 25 minutes to send your attack next tick, and waking up at 3 am to send defense, and taking extended breaks at work to check if your attack can land. Some of these things you can get other people to do for you (which moves rather than solves the problem), but some you can't.
This is a problem that is caused by the very nature of the game. Prelaunch allows people to attack in their sleep, while forcing other people to wake up to defend. The length of the round makes losing very demotivating, because losing a game of Starcraft costs 15-45 minutes of your life, but losing your attack fleet costs many, many hours of hard work. Scans require some people to play the round without actually playing it. The list goes on. These are not things you can fix by making a(nother) new set of ship stats, or by increasing the cost of MCs by another 25%. Improvement requires Serious Development, which requires money, which requires a bigger player base, which requires improvement first. A vicious circle if ever I saw one.