Quote:
Originally Posted by 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 yxeither 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.
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Hi Mzyxptlk. Sorry, still a comp noob aftet all these years. lol Nice to see you still here. Also posting from phone.I also now remember playing round 20something? with you in Acsendency 6 or 7 years ago. I recall we won that round too, hehe.
Anyway, I agree with you for the most part but let's test it to see if true or not for a round or 2. I'd hate to see PA fail because we didnt try things to prove or disprove theorys of ours of what would happen. Fact is none of us KNOW whats the answer until proven. We DO know however what the current course is like. The only fair way to judge is by results. Results never lie. Alliances dominate the game. Player base under 1K. Often harsh, but always. fair. Those are the results. Everything else is just speculation, conjecture, and assumptions includiing my own assessments, theorys, and suggestions. I just want PA headed in a different direction after 55 rounds. Isnt it time?
Btw, we can prevent players from different gals attacking together by having a reservation system where a gal can only attack 1 certain galaxy per daily time period except for retals. Once a galaxy reserves a galaxy to attack, no other galaxy can attack the same galaxy for the reservation time period. This would also ensure only 1 gal attacking your own gal per day or time period plus another gal possibly retaling your attacks on them. Of course info could be leaked but so what? A mow would need to research targets and reserve fast, haha. Knowing you will get incomming isnt that much help. Maybe an allianceless round could be boring to alliance players but maybe not to a newbie. Must we continue to be stuck in the catch22 of satisfying alliances at the expense of gaining new players? Just throwing thoughts out which Im sure has flaws.
The alliance community can continue to be the alliance community testing the theory that its not just about the game itself that keeps them socially interactive with each other. Test it for a round or 2 and lets see. Maybe what Im suggesting is all hogwash and stupid but we havn't tried anything drasically different since the beginning so what do we have to lose?
P.S. Hey Isil, can I join Apprime? lol Don't say you don't remember me bro.