toughts of a retired player

[berten]

As u must agree with me, pa is spreading it's death bed atm, hence one of the reasons i quit. Personally i think the main factor is the EXPENSIVE p2p formula it works on. Yes it'll keep running that way if also new people tend to pay this fee. But this won't happen, who'll pay for getting bashed and play a game they can't actualy play for to months.
Best solution imo is getting the price cheaper, but as that's been talked about several times yet, let me think of some other way to get new recruits in.

I once sent an email to

Ok, the idea is very simple.
A new player joins The Game and sees people fighting coordinately.
This he misses, he don't know anyone in the alliance etc and is discouraged.
How do we solve this?

I came up a plan
Whot about installing 'Boot Camps'. A new player would be contacted by a 'Boot Camp' HC which at start will be one of pateam.
The purpose of Boot Camp would be to have the new players fighting together versus the evil threat the bigger alliances will be.

They'd be divided in let's say groups of 150-200 people, bit bigger then the average sized alliance in planetarion atm.

y this big?? cause there's probably going to be sum inactives.

The hc/officers int his group are to be very dedicated an willing to boost up moral in this group, teach them how the game is fought, train them to go into battle with the big ones, and one day be a member of these powers.


now ofcourse there (if everything goes well) could be a constant comming in off new players. The good people that got trough boot camp decently (like decent attack/defend ratio, nice score roids, good knowledge of the game) could be leaded to the bigger alliances or put into play in the boot camp as officers/hc's.

Boot camp could work together with other alliances and present them well trained new players that will know how to act in an alliance and know the game.


Offcourse also people from the bootcamp could be encouraged to form a new alliance, which the boot camp crew would then help setup (not financially ofc) untill they are gone and tought how to lead a thing like that.

This thing brings various options. I agree it will take sum effort at start, but i believe the training facilty will soon be taken over by motivated new players that do wanna try this and work under the 'boot camp' crew's wings.

Ofcourse this system needs work: like how to get it unbiased and hence not directed towards certain alliances.

a solution could also be, encouraging alliances to form wings for new players in the community.


Major problem planetarion has to face tough: Getting these new players in.
With the high cost, this will be very hard, /me looks at pateam and wonders what they can do about it, as i know this decision is not in their hands. (also looking at keef, who afaik has summit more to say).

1. last round got advertised, or atleast we had a competition for it. I know the advertisement ended up somewher in a magazine, but it wasn't enough spread. Jolt will have to put some money into this if they want to keep it alive.

2. hear say, or whotever it is, how most of us got to play this game, by hearing from friends they play such a great game. I am sure many of u have m8s that are interested in this, but then again the money problem pops up.

3. There's a lot of old players around in other games, they loved planetarion in it's comunity, try to get them back etc.

4. Improve the game itself, I find it hard to encourage new players for a game u actually don't like yourself.

my personal opnion in this is:

* bring back old time simplicity. (tow ways u can go: war/science, and easy ship stats)
* bring back decent scanning: people love to know whot's going on without to much of a hassle, I know I do.
* eta fs: people without alliance stand defenceless atm. Change that, this is not very
encouriging
* let people roid as many roids as they can
* bring back the old free system in some way, let people play inside the real game for eg 2 weeks and have em then decide, don't put them in a universe with 98% planets that still have the roidcount which they started with, that's useless.

Things that imo definetly have to stay

* prelaunch
* current initiatin system, where u can initiate alot for a low price
* current concept about construction
* 1 tick combat has it's difficulties, but imo it does lower the possibility of a new player getting pwned.
* covert op's, altough it has to be made more balanced, bigger planets are to much hit this way atm, I agree there should be an "easy' way for new, smaller players to do damage to the top guys, but i don't totally know if this is THE way.
* engineering: some thinking can't harm, and this does require that

There, this is just some general idea I have atm, of what should happen to get more new
players into the game, and also KEEP them there

I hope i get responses on this one, so i can go in it much deeper then atm, cause i generally suck at trying to make my point in a statement.

Berten

[Catwoman]

What a great idea, ive always tried to think of new ways to get new players involved as you know, i think this would be a good start for them. Needs bit of work but im sure it could be refined and used. Only problem i see is the bigger greedy alliances abusing them if they get big score, by abuse i mean take them into their alliance to benifit themself during game.
might need bit more thought, but worth working on.

[berten]

Originally Posted by Catwoman

What a great idea, ive always tried to think of new ways to get new players involved as you know, i think this would be a good start for them. Needs bit of work but im sure it could be refined and used. Only problem i see is the bigger greedy alliances abusing them if they get big score, by abuse i mean take them into their alliance to benifit themself during game.
might need bit more thought, but worth working on.

that's indeed whot i meant with the biased thing i also posted above.

a system i tought of is making some things go automatically, a new player joins the game, --> he gets recruitment pa mail from an alliance which is sent automatically (ofc, the alliance can edit this msg to their believes, just like u can now in alliance screen). The guy can choose to move in to it, or jsut ignore it and join it's own alliance.

This way, each alliance willing to participate in the system would get a fair and somewhat equal amount of new players into their boot wing.

[Catwoman]

sounds good to me, wolfpack has always been willing to train new players.

[wakey]

The 'Boot Camp' idea is one thats been suggested before but its one I dont think the game needs as such training groups are already around in the form of the small alliances. Traditionally they have always been the place that new players would be trained up with most filtering up the alliance hieracey and its a system that in the past has proven very successful. The Problem this system currently has however is the large alliances weild too much power and theres too many people moving up the alliances and no-one coming in to take their place which is killing the small alliances.

If somehow we can lower the power that the top alliances have and increase the players coming in so that the smaller alliances can regain the power they once had.

Certainly fast tracking people to big alliances like this idea suggests while maybe good for those being fasttracked isnt good for the game because doing so is going to be another nail in the small alliances coffin and the closer we get to only having a handful of alliances battling it out which just leads to the game becoming increasingly dull.

As for your other ideas

* bring back old time simplicity. (tow ways u can go: war/science, and easy ship stats)
Dont you thing two ways and simple stats made the game a little stale. Everyone learnt what the best ships were quickly and everyone then ended up with the exact same fleets. With Races its a little more complex as the good ships against one race werent neccessarly good against another. You can make things over simple and make the game too one dimernsional

* bring back decent scanning: people love to know whot's going on without to much of a hassle, I know I do.
Problem here is you make scanning too easy and the game again becomes over simplfied and dull. Your just never see attacks that dont go 100% to plan as everyones been able to ensure the attack is ok and if not pull. This actually then makes it a little harder for new players as they are probally the ones who wont be able to use the scans so well

* eta fs: people without alliance stand defenceless atm. Change that, this is not very encouriging
This is one of those things where changing will have as many bad points as good points and its one I would be inclined to leave as it is as the problems it currently has can be solved via other means.You see with the current system yes defence is alot harder to get from your alliance but it also makes planets much easier to attack, so much so that I myself had around 8 successful raids on top 100 planets this round which was something i would never have been able to acheive before. Also on the whole I've noticed the amount of defence small alliance players get is actually a little higher simply because gaalxy mates now have ships at home more often as they arent out helping their alliance defend. The people who have lost have generally been the big alliances who cant get the same amount of killer defence as before.

Even without this system allianceless players are going to struggle for defence so the best way to help these is to make the small alliance more worthwhile and encourage these unaligned players to join them


* let people roid as many roids as they can
Limiting roids as we have had this round is imho a good thing, why because it limits peoples growth thus keeping the gap between top and bottom lower, especially early on in the game. It just gives those without big alliance support a slightly better chance as the big alliance players cant just run away with things due to the 'defence' their membership to these alliances gives them (a big alliance player can get away with having more roids than a small player thus grows quicker)