My point of view PAX

[cheekybru]

First of all id like to start by saying that im really enjoying PAX and i cant really understand what everyone is wining about, PAX has more things to do inbetween ticks than pa, more things to annoy ppl with (hehe ) andi think is a more fun game than pa.

HOWEVER the one thing that pa team said they were handling, that was the most importent thing to handle, never got handled, The lack of players, There will NOT be a single round that can match rounds pre r5 in terms of enjoyment until we get above 10k players.

So spinner, Please i dont care how you manage it, sell your car or summit but run a couple of free rounds, get the playerbase back, and then start charging again, and hopefully we can get a few more rounds out of this game.

PAX is good, i like it a lot, im doing absalotly pants in a c20+ gal, but hey, im enjpying it But please make r11 free, or the game wont make it to r12.

Regards

Cheek

[Kal]

nice to see someone other than me is enjoyinh the game.


A free round isn;t neccessarilyl needed, we need decent marketing, we need peopel to review the game, interviews with spinner in magazines, that jkind of thing. Planetarion's profile needs to be raised dramatically to compete with say the lieks of eve that someone can just casually walk into a shop and pick up. People may well pay for a round of planetarion, as it is actually cheaper than a lot of alternatives.

[KoeN]

i just took a look on RP (i'm waiting for almost 5 hours for a course, and 1 hour to go, OK??) and i saw they invented some game aswell.
it goes like this:


-----------------
overview

67 m roids
56 c roids
62 e roids

army

345 atom bombs
456 tomahawks
220 comanches
1390 infantry
35 anthrax letters

fleet 1 attacking cheekybru ETA5


OMG YOU ARE SO DEAD!!! :eek:
-----------------------------

and then you reply with your army and stuff.

[Hicks]

Any credible reviewer would rip PA to shreads. Including non mainstream ones.

[Leshy]

Originally posted by Hicks
Any credible reviewer would rip PA to shreads. Including non mainstream ones.

However, in the absence of those, Hicks is more than willing to fill in!

[HobbieRogue4]

Originally posted by Hicks
Any credible reviewer would rip PA to shreads. Including non mainstream ones.

[Cochese]

It's a niche market, so it won't ever be "big" if there's a cost involved. Could it be bigger? Probably, but not the size everyone seems to want.

Making it free guarantees a big turnout, as people are inherently cheap. They don't necessarily play because the game is "good", but because it doesn't cost them anything--and perhaps they have a few friends who play.

What you're left with is really two options:

1) Nuture the existing players, who are willing to pay, and give them something they feel is worth their money. Streamline your operations to maximize productivity, and otherwise think creatively about how to make the most with the little income those few players generate. In this scenario, your customers are everything . Think about what that means.

2) Find some way to make it free, so perhaps the 'quality' can suffer in exchange for a larger universe with more targets and action (how many times were pages unreacheable during the early rounds?) I don't see how this is manageable without outside influence (read: investors willing to 'throw away' money) or at the very least, scads of sizeable donations.

What people who ask for free rounds seem to overlook is, running free rounds is only "free" for the players...bills still need to be paid, and without any income for 3 months, you end up in debt from a quarterly earnings standpoint. The following quarter, if you do "well" and break even, you still have the debt from the previous quarter's free round. If you don't break even, you're just adding more debt to the pile.

Not only would you have to minimize your expenses in a free round, you would probably have to double the amount of paying players the following round...just to avoid dragging a 3 month hole of expenses along with you, which tends to grow when left unchecked.

It's just nasty business, and the last thing you'll find are easy answers.

[Kalle]

do you remember why they "introduced" p2p?

and i ask you again.... what were the reasons for the 2nd p2p round?

etc. etc. .....

[evil one]

PA died when p2p started .

[Structural Integrity]

Apart from the games features, the game also has a feel to it...

PAX feels, compared to the old PA, like a rambling rustbucket. I mean, if you have PAX on the screen, grab your monitor with both hands and shake it, you can hear the loose bolts and screws rattling. That's how PAX feels to me. It just isn't as solid as old PA.

I'm not sure why this is.... the features are nice and seem worked out good enough.
Perhaps because the two main features (combat and covops) are so unrelated to eachother. Where the most emphasis is put on combat, it seems as if covops is a bit of a redundant and totally off-topic thing (for THIS type of game).
And now that Gerbie has proven that covops can be exploited the game doesn't really give a good impression. A secondary feature, totally unrelated to the topic of the game ("space combat"), enables a player to win. That's just wrong.

Also, I don't find the developers of PAX making such a professional impression either. How long have they been working on the game? 4 months? I don't believe you can develop a water-tight game in that time, with a seemingly unprofessional BETA team and a short test period.
And when you want to charge someone $15 for a game, you BETTER have a water-tight game.

[Andy_r]

Originally posted by Structural Integrity
...Gerbie has proven that covops can be exploited the game doesn't really give a good impression. A secondary feature, totally unrelated to the topic of the game ("space combat"), enables a player to win.

Actually, that's not what happened. His amazing score gain was due to a flaw with the score given by combat, it was nothing to do with covert ops at all.

The score gain you get from an attack varies dpeending on the relative sized of the planets involved, hit someone small and you get a low score (a much needed anti-bashing measure that is taking a LONG time for people to understand), hit someone bigger and you get more score.

Spinner failed to put a cap on this multiplier, so when Gerbie killed a few ships of someone 100 times his value, he got 100 times the score a player the same size would have got, which put him up to no.1

[Jonas]

Originally posted by evil one
PA died when p2p started .

Wrong, PA died with r10. A few people can resurrect it, but its not likely to happen.

-J-

[DarkAngel]

Originally posted by Cochese
It's just nasty business, and the last thing you'll find are easy answers.

[Breeze]

Originally posted by Cochese
Could it be bigger? Probably, but not the size everyone seems to want.

What you're left with is really two options:

1) Nuture the existing players, who are willing to pay, and give them something they feel is worth their money...

2) Find some way to make it free, so perhaps the 'quality' can suffer in exchange for a larger universe with more targets and action

3) fake it.

I'm sure this was suggested in the past and rejected, but the only way you're going to get a huge p2p uni is to fake it with PA-run bot planets.

I've been thinking much the same as Cochese though - you either keep PA for the small hardcore and tailor it to their needs - or you make some serious changes. PA X seems a half way house, still almost PA, but not quite.

[hAl]

Originally posted by Jonas
Wrong, PA died with r10. A few people can resurrect it, but its not likely to happen.

-J-

Go away, you bore us with your whinging !!

[Tactitus]

Originally posted by hAl
Go away, you bore us with your whinging !!

You know, whining about whiners is just a lower form of whining.

[Tactitus]

Originally posted by Breeze
I've been thinking much the same as Cochese though - you either keep PA for the small hardcore and tailor it to their needs - or you make some serious changes. PA X seems a half way house, still almost PA, but not quite.

I agree... and said the same thing here.

[mikay]

Originally posted by Jonas
Wrong, PA died with r10. A few people can resurrect it, but its not likely to happen.

-J-

PA died after R4. 200k mostly multi accounts in R4 shrunk to maybe 20-30k in R5 and my experience was 1/3 the people who would have played quit because of p2p. Most people just quit cos basically they'd "been there, done that". That has continued to happen each round.

PA was a phenomena, probably everyone who played online games has played PA at some point. It's going to be difficult to hype it back up cos almost everyone is an ex player and quit for a reason.

Anyway this is all kind of moot, the reason most people want more players is for 4 weeks of easy roids at the start of each round. Got to say easy roids are fun but that's a kind of lame reason really.

[Baco]

I still think that it should be free with the option to pay which would allow payers to get certain advantages...I dunno how it could be implemented but I know that a lot of ppl would pay and there would be less wining....There r other online games that do this and after a while ppl start to pay even if the advantagers r not that important...Make a market research, ask other companies that added this options to their online games their results, etc and see if its possible to implement in PA, I might be wrong but I think it's the best solution....if possible...

[Jeltje]

i actulay like pax aswel

offcorse it needs some tweaks but what did u people expect?
it took a few rounds of old pa aswel to get the shipstats wel balanced and the salvage rulles ect ect.

Now there is a new version of pa and all u peopel start to moan before u actualy gave it a change to develop. Offcorse there some things in that should be tweaked like the eta system for instence would be better when it would show landing tick.
Also an research or construction witch makes u more save to convert op attacks would be nice , as there is nothing u can do when a underscore planet is convert opping u , then it would be nice if there would be a way to protect yourself, and then u can choose if u go for fats eta , ships, roids or protection against convert-ops.
I like the 1 eta attack only a newsscan should show more then it shows now. Also the cap might be a bit higher when u only have 1 tick to attack.

So wel my point spinner and fudge u made a quite ncie game only needs some tweaks. Maybe start coding it in and run a beta test for round 11? I will be happy to play and suggest for the tweaks