[Appocomaster]

Originally Posted by Light

I was reading your blogpost, presume its yours? http://xelronia.blogspot.com/2010/07/planetarion.html

and afew points to correct:
Planetarion is highly competitive and requires alot of time to even play casually (otherwise you're just basically going to be a farm). A flood of newbies wouldnt really effect the game much, other than the few training alliances which are setup would become full and could play a bigger role in politics. Those that dont manage to find an alliance, would simply be owned by the mechanics in the game.. You can not play PA solo.

If by a slim chance, the 'newbies' banded together to create several alliances of there own, the game would remain competitive as politics are open in Planetarion, so if the newbies pwned the current community with sheer numbers.. then the worst case scenario is a boring end round but even then, it would of bought back all of the old players who are currently idling on irc and not playing.

We had a case before where two communitys collided, I cant remember what happend to Planetarion but there community shifted over to ********** for a round and it became a ********** vs Planetarion round, which could of been highly fun but instead every decent ********** player simply switched sides before the round, so there was no real competition. If it happend this time, I doubt anyone would be switching over to the new players side, as no-one in this community has any ties with them (rather last time, most players in ********** came from planetarion).

Any influx of players would be good for the game and the game mechanics could certainly cope with them. Alot of members in this community were around when Planetarion had 100,000 planets with bigger alliances than they are now and in some cases, deeper politics.

Only bad thing i can see coming from this takeover, is what you said in your closing paragraph.. If JageX handles this round, it could be the end of Planetarion if they make changes which cause the old community to move and doesnt bring in a new community to replace them. Then again, i'd much prefer it if someone tried to make Planetarion a decent game, then to keep going on like it has been where nothing really changes and everything feels static and lifeless.

I have to agree with some of the points Light puts forward here.

I think that the game mechanics would suffer more (from a mid-round influx) than the community itself. We'd probably need to get some more staff from the community / Jagex. I can't honestly see a huge problem with new players; at worst there'd be no integration between them and the current player base for a while, but the galaxy dynamic would mean that some percentage of those who stayed would get integrated

Also, if new players came and were good within a round or two, I think the Planetarion players would be happy as it'd be more of a challenge for them. They thrive on competition.

Finally, I'd like to confirm that this round Jagex will be learning more about the game, with a view to getting involved more in the next couple of rounds. They've always strongly emphasised that they want to make sure that the PA Team / the community are involved in the changes and the future of the game; Mark himself said this in his announcement.