[Influence]

Yes, this game is demanding when it comes to activity to achieve top ranks. But then again, so is every other game i play (where rankings are based on the sum of points achieved). The difference between this game and the other games i play is that this game is continuous, whereas i can 'choose' at which time i want to play the other games.

What you are effectively suggesting with this 'nighttime protection' is a game you can play at your own times/pace. Something that completely goes against the design of the continuous gameplay of PA. So effectively you are asking for a completely different game.

Another feature of the current gamedesign is that in order to get an award for activity(stealing roids), you punish someone else(losing roids). The 'easiest' way to award yourself for activity, is to 'punish' the ones who are less active than you are. As a result of this design, most action happens when the least people are active ('nighttime'). During the development of PA features (Queueing of con/res, prelaunch, run&hide) have been added to stop the 'punishment' of less active players.

You can argue these features haven't done enough to change the balance of the game, and suggest new features to help the balance of the game. However, before suggesting things like that you need to stop and think how it will affect the rest of the gamedesign. Imho, adding nighttime protection as suggested here (full lockdown of the interactions you can perform on a planet in nighttime protection) punishes those who are active too much (actives will be less able to get 'awards'(steal roids)).
'

IMO, nighttime protections should be found in ways that stop the 'punishment' of the less active. My suggestions to this would be:

Allow a player to set a timespan of 6-8 ticks a day where he 'insures' his roidloss
- Attacker still gains normal amount of roids (keeping the award for activity);
- Insurance pays back a certain amount of roids (limiting the 'punishment' for being inactive);
- Insurances can only be set once every 72-144 ticks (to allow for 'changing' biorhytms);
- Insurances cannot be set while one has incs (to prevent 'triggering' insurance at the sign of incs);
- Planetscans show 'insured' ticks (to allow wars between alliances where 'hurting' someones economy is a valid tactic);
- Later on in it's lifecycle it can be developed into other branches of the game to allow for more tactics with it (ie. race bonusses, resource cost to enable a 'contract', res/con).

Abolish XP as a scoring mechanism, and make it reward mechanism
- Allowing players to get bonusses (like roids/resources/respoints/conpoints) from their XP.
- Redesigning the xp system, to an 'activity' system. based more around achievements and activity bonusses, rather than attack success and bravery.

Redesigned/added ranking system with 'historic' data (with the introduction of our unified logon this can finally be done!)
- Average number of roids stolen per attack
- Average braveryfactor per stolen roid
- Average number of lands per round/month/week
- total kills/deaths/k-d-ratio
- etc


Anyhow i am sure a lot more great suggestions can be made to achieve a less 'punishing' environment. I am completely opposed to the mandatory sleepmode for everyone tho. You should look into ways to make it easier and more rewarding for the average joe to play, while not overly damaging the active playerbase that kept this game here.


well, that's just my 2 cents into the bag.

Greetings,
Influence


P.S. I think discussing a suggestion ignoring whatever effect it has on the metagame is just stupid (tunnelvision much?). The concerns raised by Zeyi are valid concerns imo, one-sided maybe, but still valid.