Roll on R13 :-(

[Ferretus]

Hehe, I hoped this would get your attention :-)

This shuffle has ruined the game for me and my friends and I'm fed up with the PA team just implementing moronic changes without consulting the community. Yes it is their game etc and so can do whatever they want, however we are customers and PA likes to promote the community and allegedly seek our opinions.

The shuffle should have resulted in a reset or not happened. The damage caused to some gals is irreperable until new blood arrives and lets be honest... the only players worth having are likely playing already!

Also for some reason this round has cost me 2 credits? I msgd PA team who were looking into it for me but now its been sometime it seems that has gone too. Not a big deal, its only a couple of quid but when you are growing tired of a game this doesn't help me wanting to support it.

On a positive note it seems the powers that be are slowly moving in the right direction. I have been involved with the beta testing a couple of times now and it has been rewarding and productive to the game. Some of my suggestions were implemented, some were not, but overall the game is better for it. It was a brave step for the PA team but I really feel they should consult the community on such game effecting decisions such as the shuffle for example.

Also advertise the round end time. We experienced players know roughly when its going to be but I would prefer to be told a set gaming time limit from the start until the end.

So anyway roll on Round 13 where I will no longer waste money on a game that rarely consults its community on the points that count. Back to freebies for me :-) and perhaps the eventual final retirement of ARS, one of the last oldest gaming PA clans.

[jerome]

You are whining based on personal experience, that is no basis to conduct a reset. The universe bar the galaxies with paid randoms from the go, are more or less even. My private galaxy had to work it`s ass off to do mediocre, if yours isn`t good enough to get a top30 even galrank, then that is your and yours only fault. The shuffle only made sure it was ****ing hard to be top10 gal.

[xontas]

first of we did consult a lot of people
secondly the options where limited to begin with

we do not own the game, we are just people that wanne make this a better game.
the problem is that most of you want to play the game with 10 ace players and have a nice big pile of newbies waiting for you.

the setup we chose was chosen because we wanted to get the newbies involved in the game
making it 5 private and 5 random would have made this possible
we miscalculated however when we based the signuprate on the R11 signup numbers

somehow 75 gals desided to wait untill the last possible hour to make there gal open to randoms (i have no clue why this happend)
we didnt expect that problem and tbh we didnt cause it aswell (you had enough time to get a full gal)
but seeing a unbalanced universe we put the options to the aliances and we all desided on a shuffle

the results of that shuffle are known now

tbh we cant make everybody happy in this game and when you go on the forum and complain, please think of the whole universe and not just your situation.

[Jester]

Originally Posted by xontas

somehow 75 gals desided to wait untill the last possible hour to make there gal open to randoms (i have no clue why this happend)

Maybe it was harder or simply took more time to fill up packs of 5 than it took with 3.

[Inca]

Is there any chance these threads can all be put together? its just nothing new has been put in here and really if we keep the forums more compact people will find it easier to navigate as well as get more out of them.

[Helix]

Originally Posted by xontas

first of we did consult a lot of people

Yes PATeam routinely consults the community, however it is usually a very small select group of individuals (hello Alliance HC). I would like to see a more concerted effort to get the opinions of the entire community, as not only the Alliance HC have valid input. The "Discussion Hour" or whatever you guys plan to call it is a step in the right direction. However, I would like to be able to have PATeam pay more attention to the thoughts of the community. It seems like most of the suggestions are falling on deaf ears, perhaps if PATeam were to check out some of the suggestions on the suggestion forum, and post some feedback on the plausibility of some of them being implemented it would present the picture that you care about what the community thinks and not just what the alliance HC think.

Originally Posted by xontas

somehow 75 gals desided to wait untill the last possible hour to make there gal open to randoms (i have no clue why this happend)
we didnt expect that problem and tbh we didnt cause it aswell (you had enough time to get a full gal)

Actually, you did cause it. It didn't take much thinking to forsee that at least some galaxies would end up only getting filled right before the round start. You should have thought of this, and implemented a different form of signup right from the start. Having all of the random players shuffled into the private part of the universe at tickstart would have been a much better signup procedure. Hindsight is 20/20, but I am sure if you have allowed more of the community to present their ideas on the matter, the possible problem would have been pointed out by someone, that is the benefit of allowing the community to get more involved.

[Inca]

Originally Posted by Helix

Yes PATeam routinely consults the community, however it is usually a very small select group of individuals (hello Alliance HC). I would like to see a more concerted effort to get the opinions of the entire community, as not only the Alliance HC have valid input. The "Discussion Hour" or whatever you guys plan to call it is a step in the right direction. However, I would like to be able to have PATeam pay more attention to the thoughts of the community. It seems like most of the suggestions are falling on deaf ears, perhaps if PATeam were to check out some of the suggestions on the suggestion forum, and post some feedback on the plausibility of some of them being implemented it would present the picture that you care about what the community thinks and not just what the alliance HC think.

I disagree strongly with this. In another thread a pa team member comments on the fact zik were complained about as being too weak in beta's by a majority of people, this was not the case and yet pa team acted on it, and now we have overpowered ziks. Ok thats 1 example but i personally think that pateams problem is whoever they consult there are inherent problems. A second example is the question on the portal about strongest race, before the round it was pretty even but any good player with some foresight knew beyond a shadow of a doubt terran would not be strong and zik would. My point? the masses do not make the best decisions for PA. That said i personally don't think alliance HC's do either. My experience with a lot of HC is that they are good communicators and decent people to talk to, they tend not to have the best statistical minds. I am not saying this about all before i get more flame that a particularly nasty bush fire on some1's head, but i do think that alliance HC's are not the best options. PA team needs to decide based on all factors, and that isn't an easy job, too many people criticise after the event but very few and more importantly the minority predict in advance what would happen. My suggestion is look at the stats, whose doing well, who can see exploits/overpower, who can think with an open mind that inevtiably benefits all aspects of the game, there are the people that pateam should consult with more. How do you pick those? well i can't answer everything =D Yes consult alliance HC, yes consult the whole player database, but at some point decisions need to be made and for that good advice needs to be put forward.

[jerome]

Consult the people who know what they are talking about/doing. This`ll be hard to judge in some cases though.

[mist]

Originally Posted by _ryzekiel_

Consult the people who know what they are talking about/doing. This`ll be hard to judge in some cases though.

i was under the impression that they'd done that with sid, and look where it got them...

-mist

[jerome]

incase you are referring to the r11 stats, they were imho, rather fine. Only people who whined were the terrans who plainly followed the general opinion, and thus, got owned. See, what happens when following the general clueless opinion :/. All that was needed to be done was weaken the fireblade a bit, improve cath and zik a bit to make them more appealing and you got a very nice set of stats ready to go. This overhaul was never needed.

[Zh|l]

Originally Posted by mist

i was under the impression that they'd done that with sid, and look where it got them...

-mist

r11 stats werent that bad.

It's like you're saying Sid got the final say in them when he didnt. The last lot of changes were things Sid didnt know about nor test out. And let's be honest, the beta for it was a sham and even when Sid requested a private beta to get a better idea for how the stats were working it was shot down due to time constraints.

You can;t expect to get help from someone only to shoot down their suggestions and then say "it was done before."

[mist]

i was refering to all the complaints by the 'community' that pa had asked someone with a clue, not that the stats were terrible. afaik sid's last stats were pretty good

-mist

[Forest]

they just wanted someone to blame that 1up won so comprehensively, and they forget that other hc from other alliances were involved.

[Seth Mace]

Originally Posted by xontas

somehow 75 gals desided to wait untill the last possible hour to make there gal open to randoms (i have no clue why this happend) we didnt expect that problem and tbh we didnt cause it aswell (you had enough time to get a full gal) but seeing a unbalanced universe we put the options to the aliances and we all desided on a shuffle

That kinder outlines PA teams lack of foresight to me. I know i personally assumed the randoms had been placed in a seperate uni, where they would eventually be shuffled into priv gals. Im sure most others didnt "fear" that delayed gal forming would be so damaging.

Im damn feckin sure spinner said this was the plan somewhere, sometime?

Anyway, PA (yes, thats you guys!) caused the problem by removing the ONE feature that stood out as "progression" from r11, due to not enough time to fix the buddy bug.

The 5 priv gal was the next best thing BUT amazingly, your solution (as xontas is basically saying) was to create a gal formation race. Where the quickest to form gals were more likely to benifit from active random signups!

[xontas]

yes we did consult a lot of people before doing something about the problem at hand
we talked it over with the major alliances and we took it to the planetarions represetatives channel where we had a open discussion on what kinda options we had.

after that a choise was made and we carried it out
in this case the shuffle we all know and love ;-)

now looking at it now we might conclude that it wasnt the best choise but at the time most of us agreed that it was the best solution.
i for one think it was one of the best solutions in the books at that time.

most people i speak start the confo off with " but my gal....."
yes your gal might have not been the best off in the universe. but we went from having 75 gals with 5 players and some with even less to all gals being 8 to 10 players in size (yes that was checked before we opened it back up)
imo that made the universe as balaced as we could posibly get it.

the gal setup of R12 will not be known as the best ever (thats for sure) but we do have to move on at some point.
so this is my sugestion for R12

lets just take the universe as it is and try to have fun.
we are open for sugestions on how to do a better job on the gal setup in your opinion
feel free to spam my mail with those (yes i will actualy read them all)

happy roidings!

[mist]

in fairness, i still believe it was the best option available at the time.

only way to really sort it out was to wipe the db and start signups again with a decent system, but that wasn't possible

-mist

[Tomkat]

PA Team suck! Burn them! Burn them!

Although without them, we wouldn't have a game... Be a bit more appreciative before flaming them.

[Ferretus]

As it seems we have got some attention of the PA Team is there any more that can be done? Having been moaning for 170hrs now I think we are too late to turn this around. Is there any 5 man gals that can be combined to become 10 mans? This won't help everyone but it will help some at least.

Can people advertise groups of themselves to be manually moved perhaps? I don't know really. I just want everyone to have a 10 man gal and be happy bunnies.

[mist]

if you join two 5 man gals together you create a gal of 10 paying people.

this would seem to make your problem more accute, rather than solving it

-mist

[Seth Mace]

There were better solutions but they werent possible due to lack of coding time:E

[Metrofx]

Why do you think that this game dropped from 120k Planets down to almost nothing hehe

[xontas]

when we did the shuffle the smallest gals where 8 people
we have no way (exept help you guys cheat) to make this any better

so this is how it is for now
(yes we are not happy about this 2)
i suggest we make the most of it and we talk about how you guys want it in the future.
as i said before i am open for any suggestions
feel free to mail those to me

greetz
Xontas

[Synthetic_Sid]

Originally Posted by mist

i was under the impression that they'd done that with sid, and look where it got them...

-mist

I had no involvement in the Beta this round (due to being too busy with RL work). I did give my views on galaxy setup in the alliances discussion forum - but what was implemented was not what I suggested. Simply asking for input solves nothing - the answers received have to be acted on before they have any effect.

[The_Fish]

Originally Posted by xontas

somehow 75 gals desided to wait untill the last possible hour to make there gal open to randoms (i have no clue why this happend)

No-one told me that to stand a chance of getting active randoms I'd have to sign up early. If I had known that, i would have made sure my gal was signed up early. As it was, we were all in the gal by tickstart, which is where we always planned to be. I didn't realise i had made such a round ruining mistake with it.

[Conall]

Originally Posted by xontas

the setup we chose was chosen because we wanted to get the newbies involved in the game
making it 5 private and 5 random would have made this possible
we miscalculated however when we based the signuprate on the R11 signup numbers

somehow 75 gals desided to wait untill the last possible hour to make there gal open to randoms (i have no clue why this happend)
we didnt expect that problem and tbh we didnt cause it aswell (you had enough time to get a full gal)
but seeing a unbalanced universe we put the options to the aliances and we all desided on a shuffle

Xontas - I think the two main reasons this occurred was due to the late decision to go to 5 person private galaxies and a faster than expected start date for the round. Most people had their 3 member gal set up for this round. Many were away taking a much needed break when the decision was made to go to 5. This left many to scramble to fill the extra 2 slots. Since that would mean breaking existing agreements with gal mates then it was difficult to find the additional 2 needed. People wanted to stick with their mates or at least stick to their promises. If the decision had been announced prior to the round end or if the number had been 6 person private galaxies much of the turmoil might have been avoided. And frankly the quick turn around for starting this round caught some people off guard as well.