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Unread 27 Apr 2009, 20:13   #1
Kal
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End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

This is a follow on thread to http://pirate.planetarion.com/showthread.php?t=197716 where I discussed my initial impressions after signing up. Here I plan to say what I think up until the end of protection.

Good things

-I thought 72 ticks of doing nothing would be dull, however there is plenty to do especially with meeting new galaxy members etc. Probably more to do in my case as I went random so had more people to meet, but still 72 ticks actually feels about right. It would be good if there were more quests to do during protection - perhaps the real flaw here is that so many can be done before tick start.

-I'm inactive and I have a decent rank at this stage - sure my rank will plumet over the next week as I get roided to pieces, but its nice that I can at least get something out of the game without loosing any sleep.

-The ability to specify a pa mail that goes to new members of your galaxy when they join. This is an excelent tool for getting people involved and active.

Bad things

-people in my galaxy are already thinking about exiling people. And I'm not talking super inactive people, I'm talking people who have made breif IRC appearances. I'd also point out that I'm not in a galaxy full of super actived hard core players, my galaxy mates are not in top 10 alliances and yet they still seem to be trigger happy when it comes to exiling. This only makes me more convinced that exiling needs to go.

-User interface - one thing that has come to annoy me is the seeminly randomness of things such as font size and spacing. the in game forums are good a good example - the initial display when you go in looks poor with just a list of threads - it just doesn't look interesing. Another good example is the spacing between the tables on each page that hold the diaplyed information, in my opinion there is far too much space between them - its makes the pages big and ugly. So I'll reiterate my early point - a complete user interface overhaul is required.

-consitency between in game elements. In my mind research and construction should be the same - in both cases you should be able to start and stop (in the case of constructions, a paused construction should take up and infrastructure position) and both should have queues. While I might be favouring the inactives too much - I think being able to queue once would make me, somoene who can only be online briefly in the morning and in the evening much more competitive - if I struggle with my activity levels, where will we find new players?

-web site speed - the pages that involve heavy database access are slow, this is annoying.

-links to external sites e.g. stats. I've thought about this a bit, and have decided I'd much prefer it if things like stats didn't goto an external site. Perhaps what I'm really after though is much tighter portal/game integration.


I know I've concentrated on bad things here, but its all the little userinterface inconsistencies, and ugliness things that have really grabbed me during proteciton - they are the things that mean I actually get annoyed while playing the game. The interface needs to make the game a pleasure to use and easy to use. I should want to log in purely to play with the interface - I shouldn't be bored and annoyed with it after such a short period of time - just think how much its going to be annoying me by the end of the week.

On a plus point, at this stage at least I haven't found anything fundamentally wrong with the game - I think the concept is still good, I think the game is going to keep me interested, all that really needs to improve is the interface.
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Unread 27 Apr 2009, 20:26   #2
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

Nice post.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kal View Post
While I might be favouring the inactives too much
As long as you're not hurting the hardcore players too much (which you're not), this is impossible.
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Unread 27 Apr 2009, 20:35   #3
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kal View Post
-User interface - one thing that has come to annoy me is the seeminly randomness of things such as font size and spacing. the in game forums are good a good example - the initial display when you go in looks poor with just a list of threads - it just doesn't look interesing. Another good example is the spacing between the tables on each page that hold the diaplyed information, in my opinion there is far too much space between them - its makes the pages big and ugly. So I'll reiterate my early point - a complete user interface overhaul is required.
I've been using this for my skin for the last few rounds (names and coords have been changed), the forums are a particular favourite of mine.

In Game Forum redesign
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Unread 27 Apr 2009, 20:36   #4
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

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Originally Posted by MrLobster View Post
I've been using this for my skin for the last few rounds (names and coords have been changed), the forums are a particular favourite of mine.

In Game Forum redesign
which skin is that?
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Unread 27 Apr 2009, 21:36   #5
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

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Originally Posted by Kal View Post
-web site speed - the pages that involve heavy database access are slow, this is annoying.
which pages would that be? i really haven't found much pages that's got more than 0.3-0.5sec load times, exception being the ally defpage with loads of reported fleets etc.
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Unread 27 Apr 2009, 21:47   #6
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

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Originally Posted by Cincinnatus View Post
which pages would that be? i really haven't found much pages that's got more than 0.3-0.5sec load times, exception being the ally defpage with loads of reported fleets etc.
I was counting that as fairly slow

the universe pages tend to be fairly slow, also for me the forums one seem to be as well.

EDIT - it seems that its just universe misc thats a little slow
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Unread 27 Apr 2009, 21:57   #7
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kal View Post
I was counting that as fairly slow

the universe pages tend to be fairly slow, also for me the forums one seem to be as well.

EDIT - it seems that its just universe misc thats a little slow
not really sure you can count that as slow, all things considered, but there might be a few queries etc we can optimize. Most pages load at around 0.2sec for me so and there are those that's quite a bit below 0.1, but the universe misc page is slower will take a look a those queries.
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Unread 27 Apr 2009, 22:04   #8
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kal
-people in my galaxy are already thinking about exiling people. And I'm not talking super inactive people, I'm talking people who have made breif IRC appearances. I'd also point out that I'm not in a galaxy full of super actived hard core players, my galaxy mates are not in top 10 alliances and yet they still seem to be trigger happy when it comes to exiling. This only makes me more convinced that exiling needs to go.

Removing exiling will only lead to hc players registering multiple accounts and sticking with the best one after shuffle. I already found the removal of the galaxy disband option strange for this round, especially since currently if conditions are met the green 'Your gal is in the lowest 10% and gal disband is available' message still appears on overview. This just leads to quicker self-exiles since there's no free 'everything has gone wrong, let's hit the red button' option.
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Unread 27 Apr 2009, 22:07   #9
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

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Originally Posted by Kal View Post
which skin is that?
Should have mentioned its a Round 5 skin one that I recreated, and using the opera browser you can overwrite the PA CSS.
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Unread 27 Apr 2009, 22:10   #10
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

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Originally Posted by MrLobster View Post
Should have mentioned its a Round 5 skin one that I recreated, and using the opera browser you can overwrite the PA CSS.
so we dont have to use the crap they provide?! WOOHOO! green blob for that little beauty
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Unread 28 Apr 2009, 02:03   #11
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kal View Post
-people in my galaxy are already thinking about exiling people. And I'm not talking super inactive people, I'm talking people who have made breif IRC appearances. I'd also point out that I'm not in a galaxy full of super actived hard core players, my galaxy mates are not in top 10 alliances and yet they still seem to be trigger happy when it comes to exiling. This only makes me more convinced that exiling needs to go.
Planetarion is so dependant on good/active players to have any chance of getting a good rank in the game that just removing it would be harmful. I assume that a fair chunk of people who play Planetarion are determined - maybe not play to win, but at least play as best as possible to get a good score.

Simply removing exiling for galaxies might remove some players hope. Galaxies exile inactive players in the hope that their replacements might be a bit more active. Cut off this and players might just decide to abandon their planet and come back for the next round instead, if they're in a deadend galaxy without enough resources for yet another exile - why bother playing?

I think what's needed is more help to lower ranking galaxies before you even consider it. I'm not suggesting that galaxy exile should stay, but you need to improve the situation for lower ranking players before you cut off things like this.
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Unread 28 Apr 2009, 02:42   #12
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

you could reduce the amount of exiles each galaxy gets to say 5 or so.
That way they will think twice before exiling semiactive players.
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Unread 28 Apr 2009, 03:16   #13
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

As far as Disbanding galaxys goes, i like the fact that there are now lots of small galaxys but i fear the implementation has been wrong and its strongly punishing exiles and new players. As after around 1 week when galaxys have stopped exiling people, all the new players will then join these 'crap' galaxys with only 2-5members in them giving them a rotten experience.

I think for disband galaxys we need to find a safe way to determine which galaxys should be allowed to disband and which ones shouldnt.

For exiling, Wishmasters suggestion seems ok.. As it makes semi-active players alot more valuable and makes it alot more risky to exile them.
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Unread 28 Apr 2009, 07:12   #14
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

Quote:
Originally Posted by MrLobster View Post
Should have mentioned its a Round 5 skin one that I recreated, and using the opera browser you can overwrite the PA CSS.
why not give the skin to PATeam to include in the game?
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Unread 28 Apr 2009, 07:13   #15
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Wishmaster View Post
you could reduce the amount of exiles each galaxy gets to say 5 or so.
That way they will think twice before exiling semiactive players.
I like this idea.
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Unread 28 Apr 2009, 17:52   #16
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

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why not give the skin to PATeam to include in the game?
Yes please, that was my favourite skin, and round 3 skin
great work MrLobster!!
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Unread 28 Apr 2009, 20:04   #17
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

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why not give the skin to PATeam to include in the game?
Probably due to many owners the legality of the skin is iffy?
Who knows.
The older skins are better then the majority of the options we have now sadly :crymeariver:
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Unread 29 Apr 2009, 15:42   #18
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

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Probably due to many owners the legality of the skin is iffy?
Who knows.
The older skins are better then the majority of the options we have now sadly :crymeariver:
r6-9 cathaar FTW
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Unread 29 Apr 2009, 17:31   #19
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Psi_K View Post
Probably due to many owners the legality of the skin is iffy?
Who knows.
The older skins are better then the majority of the options we have now sadly :crymeariver:
Considering the R3, R5. R6 (TE,CA,XA,ZI) was used in game, I dont think that too many problems exist with reintroducing them (even if recreating them).

I will have a look at perhaps totally new skins and also look at sending over the r3/r5 skins for use ingame.

The main problem with current skins, are a partial implementation.
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Unread 30 Apr 2009, 20:35   #20
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kal View Post
-User interface - one thing that has come to annoy me is the seeminly randomness of things such as font size and spacing. the in game forums are good a good example - the initial display when you go in looks poor with just a list of threads - it just doesn't look interesing. Another good example is the spacing between the tables on each page that hold the diaplyed information, in my opinion there is far too much space between them - its makes the pages big and ugly. So I'll reiterate my early point - a complete user interface overhaul is required.
It's not just the look of the interface, but how it works is just absolutely awful. I've decided to try covops this round, it's horrific to try and organise. The typical process:

- Pick a suitable planet, should ideally be 5 times my value to get the maximum gain from it. First problem - Planetarion doesn't actually allow me to order the universe ranking by value - just score! Looks like I have to use a third party site (Sandmans) to find targets which are good enough.

- Scan a planet. Firstly I need to check to see if I've picked the planet before recently - maybe I've already scanned it recently and it's a planet I should avoid. Well, I can search through my scans, if it exists I can click on the previous can to check it - but I can't add any notes to that particular planet very easily. Of course if I want to actually scan again I'll have to enter the co-ords another time just to get the new scan.

- Attack! Erm - get the calculator out! Firstly the covert ops manual page is an absolute disgrace, it's a complete wall of text which would take quite a while for anyone to read through and understand. I did eventually figure out the numbers of agents I need for a particular covert operation, but that's where I left it.

The game has no builtin calculator to calc the odds of me being able to perform a successful covop against a particular planet. Apparently LCH has (or had) one, but their site is currently dead so I don't even know if it works or if it's accurate this round. So without a calculator I've got no idea what the chances are of a successful operation - something which is absolutely vital when deciding if you should attack a target or not.

The problems here are both poor documentation and poor user interface.

I mean, covert operations are supposed to be something which the little planets are supposed to be able to use against enemies they've got no other chance of attacking. This is something which should be ideal for new players to use to make a difference - yet it's so damn confusing and awkward to use if you do actually understand it.

It needs to change so badly.
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Unread 30 Apr 2009, 22:42   #21
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

Quote:
Originally Posted by GReaper View Post
I mean, covert operations are supposed to be something which the little planets are supposed to be able to use against enemies they've got no other chance of attacking. This is something which should be ideal for new players to use to make a difference - yet it's so damn confusing and awkward to use if you do actually understand it.
There you go again, throwing phrases like "supposed to" and "should be" around without once giving it a moment's thought or providing any arguments why it should be so.
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Unread 30 Apr 2009, 23:23   #22
GReaper
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Re: End of protection impressions from someone who hasn't signed up for many rounds.

Okay, I would assume that some of the covert operations are an ideal tool for small planets to make a difference - especially given that resource transfers are designed to be used against planets 5 larger in value than your own. Yes they've got other great uses as well, but this should be a feature which should be given to new players as a decent playstyle.

How it all works along with the interface is still shit regardless of who uses it.
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