[Mzyxptlk]

I feel like your analysis of PA is spot on, and if it does not describe the whole problem, it comes pretty close. Alliance elitism and bashing and the lack of willingness to induct new players into the community is a large part of the cause behind the continuing decline of the game. However, your proposed solution is not feasible, nor is it ultimately desireable.

It isn't feasible because even without alliances, people can still defend each other. That's what people did pre-PAX, after all. You could limit defense to within galaxies, but that only deals with half of the issue. You can't ban a bunch of people from cooperating offensively. You need no ingame tools for that, you just launch your attacks all at the same time. Back in round 1, alliances formed spontaneously, because cooperating with other people is objectively the best way to win in PA. You cooperate with other planets in your galaxy, your galaxy cooperates with other galaxies in your cluster, clusters cooperate(d) with other clusters in alliances, and alliances cooperate with each other through NAPs. The more people you cooperate with, the easier the game becomes. Removing the ingame representation of alliances (which is all you can do!) will not change that.

It's not desireable because to a large extent, alliances make up the community. When I said that alliances were formed in order to win, that was only half of the truth: the other half is that the interaction with other people is what keeps people playing, not the game itself, which was never that interesting, and still isn't. Prod ships, launch fleet, check scans, recall or land, rinse, repeat. Not exactly the stuff of legends. Alliances make up a large part of PA's social side, and removing them will make this game worse for everyone who wants to play this game for more than a couple of rounds, which is what is necessary. People playing for one round and then quitting gain us nothing.

This leads us to the following concundrum: we can either have a game with alliances that's hell for new players, or a game without alliances that's boring. Neither is particularly desireable.

What should be done is making it more beneficient for veterans to interact positively with new players. Right now, said interaction is limited to roiding and exiling them. Unfortunately, I don't really know how to do that.

P.S. Your enter key is broken.