There's a bit to say on this, most of it not exactly pleasant. First off building a game towards newbies is just pointless at the minute. Most of them don't bother playing for longer than a few days, few of those that do actually pay for the game, and the vast, vast majority don't stick around for more than one round. Simply put the game looks like shit and is so poorly laid out it's extremely difficult to actually get into. Seriously, load up the portal or your overview and try to imagine what it's like as a new player. The manual is an outmoded bunch of walls of text stuck together. You could probably read the entire ****ing thing, which would probably take about 6 hours, and still be almost no wiser as to how the people who do well at the game actually do it. Here, I'll write out some basic points that would be more useful than the manual.
RESEARCH SHIPS.
BUILD SHIPS.
DO NOT LOSE SHIPS.
ATTACK SMALLER PLANETS TO GAIN ROIDS.
JOIN YOUR GALAXY'S IRC CHANNEL (with an explanation on how to do this)
TALK TO YOUR GALAXY MATES
JOIN AN ALLIANCE
If you don't do all of these things there's pretty much no way you'll be playing the game for longer than a month as it's totally uninteresting without the alliance/galaxy meta-game.
Until these things are actually fixed I'd rather see pateam attempt to build a game that's better suited to the current playerbase, who are relatively active, wish they weren't and are fairly bored by the lack of changes. PA probably has a general base, ie people who would be willing to play a round, of some 2000 people, of whom maybe half actually play each round. If you can get say 1500 of these playing, and willing to stay fairly active for most of the round, it's really going to improve the quality of the game, and as such there's likely to be a small amount of growth. To be honest most of these players don't like total randomness. Total randomness is really just annoying with the amount of hours people put into the game. Even "slightly unpredictable battles" won't really add much. What Planetarion players do like is options. Different things to do with your fleet and different ways to do it. Give everyone more of that and they'll play a bit more.
One thing I definitely wouldn't do is try to address the situation by introducing a new and relatively complicated formula to the game. For those of us with short memories PAteam did this in r10 and gerbie ended up with 5 times the amount of score of the #2 planet because his 3 fighters killed ships belonging to a planet that was way bigger than his. The track record of implementation of such changes is diabolical, just look at this round and the butchered changes pateam, under the prompting of various alliance HC, forced on us. Well, first off they didn't address the "problem" they were trying to, as I know my alliance has fortress galaxies already (which I predicted pre-round and asked for total random galaxies to be introduced if they really wanted to stop it </blowingmyownhorn>). Luckily galaxies without active randoms are now utterly ****ed due to the fact that they don't have 4 people to do exiles in order to get active planets and pateam, in their wisdom, didn't bother reintroducing the galaxy disband. Fan-****ing-tastic. Although xp for different things might be interesting I have my doubts it'd actually make the game significantly more appealing and, given the likelihood of it all going totally fubar, probably not worth bringing in.
Edit (Appoco): Originally posted in response to posts
here
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