[Mzyxptlk]

It seems to me that PA's success is very much connected to the age in which it was developed. It would not have been imaginable 10 years (probably even 5 years) earlier, and we can see that it has only barely kept itself afloat during the last 5 years, and that's a generous assessment. The community and its desire to keep playing a PA-like game, a lack of alternatives for a real-time MMOStrategyG (Eve being the only exception I can think of), the (financially) low cost of playing and the even lower cost of maintenance are the things that have kept PA alive, if we can call it that.

If someone were to start a PA clone now, using not only similar game mechanics, but the general feel of the game (though not necessarily the exact same design), it would fail spectacularly. Even the clones that were started during PA's heydays are all but dead now, and they had a head start because they had a large community to draw players from.

I'm inclined to agree with Spinner that the only monetary value in PA is the name and domain. I would add that it is also the name and the domain, but especially the community that uses it as home base that are holding it back from reaching its potential. Let me explain.

Every single person playing PA now is playing it because they enjoyed the feel of the original. Even the experiences of the people who never played the game before PAX (me, for example) are profoundly affected by how the community shaped itself during those early days. The echoes of that time are still reverberating throughout PA, not in the last because many of the most influential people in the community today are remnants of that time.

The effect of that kind of age in the community is that change is almost universally regarded as dangerous, and not entirely unreasonably so. Making major changes to a 10 year old game that can barely sustain itself could be the straw that breaks the camel's back: if the active core of the community were to leave before new growth has begun, the game is at serious risk of collapsing on itself.

In that light, it seems reasonable to assert that almost none of the players cares about what will happen to the game Planetarion but for one reason: we worry about having a place to play. Currently, there is no alternative to PA, so we try en masse to keep it as faithful to the original as possible, lest the changes that are introduced will lead to its destruction, stranding us in a world without a game to play: unimaginable.

There is not only a resistance to the few changes that are suggested, but also a distinct lack of imagination of what PA could become. We are so stuck in 10 years of history, that we simply can't come up with major changes. This is especially apparent in the players who are most inclined to think of themselves as progressive. Paradoxically, these are in fact some of the most traditional, always excessively worrying about how a change could negatively affect PA. Just about all of the changes supported by this group are in fact calls to return to the golden age of PA: reintroducing multiing, allowing farms, removing tag limits... the list goes on.

This resistance to change, coupled with a lack of ability of creative thought (more common in the traditionalists) encourages making only small changes, because the fallout and risk is likely to be more manageable: if it turns out not to work, everyone can imagine discarding the change the very next round. Choosing between single or multi targetting, disallowing inter-alliance defense, removing cluster defense eta bonus, raising or lowering tag limits by 20, even changing the ship stats every round: all of these are virtually risk-free changes. Being risk-free, however, also means they are almost guaranteed to have no effects worth mentioning. Good lightning rods, though.

As long as the Powers That Be feel constrained or even affected by the people who currently play PA, PA not only won't, but can't be improved. It is all too easy to turn around and blame the demise of the game on Appoco, on Cin, on Jagex, on whoever: the truth is that we, the people, are to blame: it's better to muddle along, keep what we have, than to risk losing it all.