[Achilles]

As I stated in the thread linked by Gate I believe that inaccessibility of scans is the single greatest impediment to the new player learning and sticking with the game. Here's a true story about my own personal experience with this in R25.

Last round my 2 housemates wanted to see what all the fuss was about and signed up planets. Not an easy procedure as neither had used irc before and we had to apply for exceptions and so on. This process could be a lot easier and I think less restrictive (since it by definition stopped me from playing with said friends in any meaningful capacity) but that's a topic for another day. After we'd all been cleared to play I spent 30 minutes going over the basics with them, just the planet building stuff really. I told them we'd go over combat and ship building later.

So roll on ~100 ticks and their fleets are ready and I show them Ascendancy scans and the stats sheet and got them to pick targets. When they ****ed it up I explained how and they got it right the second time. All was good, both launched, then capped and everyone was happy, they seemed genuinely pleased with the game and were looking forward to attacking again. But then I explained that they would have to ask other people they didn't know for scans in future (we had already reached the exception limit for attacking together) or spend 200 ticks (1 1/2 weeks or so) researching their own they both swiftly lost a lot of interest. All they wanted was to be able to log in, look for targets and attack. I had to tell them that simply isn't possible. For some reason I personally felt embarrassed at this and I think PATeam should too. 1 guy stuck with it a bit and built ships to defend his galaxy when they asked, the other made it to units, saw how long he still had to go before he could attack properly and lost all interest, never logging in again.

I wonder how common this story is? I'm not going to waste my time thinking up a solution to this problem that will almost certainly never be implemented. That said, I really hope I'm wrong and that an admin does take an interest in this.