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Unread 17 Dec 2004, 14:03   #1
Meciha
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About Pa-history

I wondered if some of you can help me out with a few questions I have about the history of planetarion. First of all if someone still knows how and when planetarion first became available on the internet. My guess would be about some 5 years ago but I'm not too sure about this. It might probably not have been one of the first internet games around; but I reckon they must have done something differently to attract so many players in a considerable short period. Which kinda leads to my next question: at its peak how many members did planetarion have? Must probably have been around r4 I guess. And what was the driving force behind the growth of the community? Marketing efforts, or just an exploding internet market with not very many internet games around, or basically planetarions' creators unique approach to internet gaming?

If there are already any threads on this forums about PA-history which are sincere and deal with actual facts, could you please refer me to those? I have tried looking for them, but couldn't really find any. I would be most grateful.

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Unread 17 Dec 2004, 14:05   #2
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Re: About Pa-history

r4 had around 180k planets.

Now, don't mix planets and players :-P The number of actual players was far lower. Two mates of mine had 12 accounts each, in the same gal. When havoc came they pooled all res to the main planets, and got a bigass fleet, and owned me :-(
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Unread 17 Dec 2004, 15:16   #3
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Re: About Pa-history

It was all part of the game back then, like an extra strategic feature almost . How effectively can you organize your multi accounts :P Created both bad and good things

But has IRC been part of the game for as long as you can remember? And same question for alliances, did they evolve naturally in the game? Or was it like "an option" provided by the creators. Cannot really remember if they provided alliances with traveltime bonusses back then. Thought they didn't. Could also well have been that in order to assist in better coordination, the players themself turned to IRC as an extra tool. That's stuff I don't know but would like to find out. Maybe someone has a saved screenshot from the overview page in round 1?
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Unread 17 Dec 2004, 15:24   #4
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Re: About Pa-history

Was no travelbonus for alliance defence back then, no. Alliances were important for as long as I can remember (started playing 13th December, 2000, around 17:15 CET).

IRC was allways important, atleast in my oppinion. It has perhaps been more of an absolute requirements as the playerbase got smaller, and those who stayed were the active ones (who used IRC). But for me, PA has allways been connected to IRC
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Unread 17 Dec 2004, 16:42   #5
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Re: About Pa-history

PA was advertised by spinner on quakenet apparently (this was pre-r1) so the irc connection sort of springs from there. That and the fact it's better than msn for what you want in PA. Alliances have pretty much always been around. The first ones were cluster alliances though, T6E, 17th legion, c7r (I'm pretty sure concordium was mainly either cluster 2 or 4 as well). PA probably had around 50k players in r4. During it's earlier days it was all exponential growth you see. Spinner gets a thousand people to play the game who all tell four friends who tell four friends...... making it virtually impossible to actually have a declining memberbase even when you account for those who didn't like the game and chose not to play it. It definitely wasn't one of the first internet games but it was one of the first that seemed to really know what it was doing (seriously guys there were some really incompetent people running RPGs back then )

Also scouse made a PA history site which you can find here. There's a fair bit of r1 information, screenshots and so on there.
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Unread 17 Dec 2004, 17:14   #6
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Re: About Pa-history

If someone still knows how and when planetarion first became available on the internet - Round 1 (Which was supposedly a beta) started in mid February 2000 so coming close to six years now, there was a closed alpha before this but I'm not sure when this ran.

At its peak how many members did planetarion have? – Peaked in Round 4, there were 180,000 planets I'd say between 75,000 and 80,000 actual players, probably on the lower end of that.

What was the driving force behind the growth of the community? It was certainly nothing to do with marketing, the only time I ever remember seeing Planetarion anywhere was a piece in PC Gamer (UK) about Round 2 starting and they picked it up on their own, they were just lucky, their approach certainly wasn't unique there were several other web based tick games around during Round 1 however Planetarion was fairly easy to pick up and play and was free, the game expanded by word of mouth, their big coup early on was managing to pull most of Quakenet in which set the ball rolling.

Has IRC been part of the game for as long as you can remember? Pretty much, although a lot of early alliances tried to make use of Email and instant messages, however because of the way games spread the IRC/Mainstream gaming community were one of the first groups to get involved, most of us used IRC for clan stuff already so setting up channels for Planetarion wasn't an issue, up until Planetarion IRC started up #planet and #planetarion were two of the most popular channels on Quakenet. It was a similar story on EF net and other servers.

Alliances evolved because of the travel time bonus inta cluster, I guess in that way the creators did spur their growth but I don't think they realised just how organised they'd become, they envisaged a world where the alliances would disband at the end of the round and then new cluster alliances would form the next round, unfortunately alliances learnt to they could organise themselves effectively on a universe wide scale things took off from there. There was very little encouragement from the creators again it was largely down to the community.

http://www.caeneus.org/planetarion/O...1overview.html <- Nodrog's Round 1 overview
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Unread 17 Dec 2004, 20:44   #7
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Re: About Pa-history

Thanks, that sure has helped me a lot. The thing that I still find difficult to understand however is that when going through the history of planetarion, asking at different sources, the game and the dynamics have clearly been dictated by the community itself. Such as the entire alliance concept, the major role of irc in the game. Which leaves me to ask: who owns the community?

I.m.o this would still be the players, but you can tell that there's some strange thing at work here, pointing to the role Jolt plays in all of this. As I understand it, planetarion became a financial liability for the creators and they where (through lack of economic skills??) unable to make it profitable, or at least worth the time and energy invested. So they sold it. And in this event they transferred ownership (which I presume is the coding and the domain name) to Jolt. Thing is, that when a community becomes a private good, it isn't really a community anymore is it? And the only way in which such a construction could ever work is when the owner acts as an agent serving the best interest of the community. I am doing a paper about online communities, this being the reason I want to know all these things. Any thoughts on this?
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Unread 17 Dec 2004, 21:31   #8
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Exclamation Re: About Pa-history

PA opened on or about February 1, 2000 (see here).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Meciha
Thanks, that sure has helped me a lot. The thing that I still find difficult to understand however is that when going through the history of planetarion, asking at different sources, the game and the dynamics have clearly been dictated by the community itself. Such as the entire alliance concept, the major role of irc in the game. Which leaves me to ask: who owns the community?
I don't think anyone owns the community. It's a voluntary association and people are free to come and go as they wish.
Quote:
I.m.o this would still be the players, but you can tell that there's some strange thing at work here, pointing to the role Jolt plays in all of this. As I understand it, planetarion became a financial liability for the creators and they where (through lack of economic skills??) unable to make it profitable, or at least worth the time and energy invested. So they sold it. And in this event they transferred ownership (which I presume is the coding and the domain name) to Jolt. Thing is, that when a community becomes a private good, it isn't really a community anymore is it? And the only way in which such a construction could ever work is when the owner acts as an agent serving the best interest of the community. I am doing a paper about online communities, this being the reason I want to know all these things. Any thoughts on this?
I don't really understand your question. The PA community is like a community of regular patrons at a bar or a community of fans for a football team. The community consists mostly of customers which the business is free to cater to or ignore as they see fit. If/when the business changes hands the community may remain or disband.
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Unread 18 Dec 2004, 01:08   #9
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Re: About Pa-history

Hicks - i signed up to Planetarion in March 2000, after seeing an article (about half a page!) in PC Gamer (UK) on it - again though i think they picked it up themselves. I do remember them mentioning it when round 2 started, and i think maybe once more since then, but that's about it.

Round 1 to my knowledge started on February 1st 2000 (i seem to remember them celebrating its 1st birthday on feb 1st 2001). As for IRC - i remember everyone used a variery of servers at first, i for one used DALnet which is where the official #planetarion was. About May of 2000, irc.planetarion.com was set up, the official IRC server, and just about everyone moved there.
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Unread 18 Dec 2004, 01:52   #10
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Re: About Pa-history

This is what I mean tacticus: when people work together towards certain goals, have a shared opinion about things etc they can form a community. Ofc a community is not owned, as we are talking about people and communication between people. Not something you can own obviously And thats precisely my point. Like I tried to state, but perhaps failed, is that the game is an essential part of the community. And, this in my opinion being very relevant, the game's dynamics are determined by the community members. A two way street you see: community affects game, game affects community. When someone claims ownership over the game they disrubt this balance, or metaphorically speaking making it a one way street. As I have been told, the game evolved due to community member initiative: building alliances, turning to IRC as a means of organisation. What I want to know is how can someone ever own (with the goal to make profit) the very essence around which a community revolves, without destroying it?
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Unread 18 Dec 2004, 11:22   #11
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Re: About Pa-history

Just consider what you pay for when you buy your planetarion credits. Do you buy an account to play the super leetest game there has ever been in the history of online gaming? Do you buy an account to a game that is so well balanced and thought through it's worth every penny? I have a hard time believing that. I tell you what you are buying instead: a reason to hang out with your mates on irc, a reason to whine about how Sid has ruined your life, to make fun of lch's astounishing tactical skills or to make sure LordBrem doesn't finish in top 100 . Perhaps read about toilets in battleships or make convincing pleas about tarantulas being teh fetish.

The game without the community i.m.o. isn't all that interesting; it's the community that really hooks you on to it. But what do you get when the community members no longer possess any influence over how the game evolves? Let's imagine a scenario where people outside the community decide the course of the game, poisoned by financial motives and ignorance. That only leaves you with a declining member base. Planetarion may have been founded by the creators but every single brick has been built by the people that play it. So in that sense Planetarion will never be owned by investors and ownership will always reside in the community itself.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it all just doesn't make sense to me. Imo there's only one course of action that will benefit both parties: leave planetarion to the planetarion players. Surely Jolt can assist in basic things, provide the labour that is needed to get things done. As for the development, the soul of Pa, stay clear of that and let it naturally evolve. Succeed in doing that, you'll gain one of the most important marketing tools that a company can get: happy customers.
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Unread 18 Dec 2004, 12:36   #12
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Re: About Pa-history

Quote:
Originally Posted by Quad
r4 had around 180k planets.

Now, don't mix planets and players :-P The number of actual players was far lower. Two mates of mine had 12 accounts each, in the same gal. When havoc came they pooled all res to the main planets, and got a bigass fleet, and owned me :-(
PACrew (Spinner and Zeus in particular) used to always say they estimated there wa around 120k of those 180k who were legit with the wit hthe other 60k being inactives who werent playing any more or cheaters who they knew were cheating but didnt have the evidence to close them. However I have noticed recently this fugure seems to have been scaled back a fair bit so who knows how many players there actually were

The Closed beta that people mentioned was advertised around the newsgroups by spinner around about oct 1999. One such newsgroup posting is below

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/...4fa51a20c49ce/


Oh and Nef while your right Dalnet had an Official PA channel I believe i'm right in saying it wasnt the only official channel. Quakenet and some others also had an official channel, it was this split that primartly brought about irc,planetarion.com
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Unread 18 Dec 2004, 16:31   #13
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Re: About Pa-history

Quote:
Originally Posted by wakey
Oh and Nef while your right Dalnet had an Official PA channel I believe i'm right in saying it wasnt the only official channel. Quakenet and some others also had an official channel, it was this split that primartly brought about irc,planetarion.com
I always suspected as much. But i think it was a Creator or Mod or someone who directed me to DALnet's channel, so i always took that to be the main one
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Unread 21 Dec 2004, 05:20   #14
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Re: About Pa-history

I played r2 - 5, and I return to find everything has changed. I've got a few questions about the last 9 rounds or so...........

1. How many people actually play now? And are alliances the crux of the game still? In r2-5, if you weren't in a good alliance you were toast.

2. Speaking of alliances, what happened to Legion, Fury, Wolfpack (though I can still see some mention of them), NoS(again, I still see them around), etc. And who are the big alliances right now?

3. Do the big players of old still play? Like Game, BiggDogg, Singularity, Synthetic Sid etc?

And...

4. Is it worth taking part in r13? I'm still undecided...........
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Unread 21 Dec 2004, 05:40   #15
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Re: About Pa-history

point by point...

1. about 4000. Currently 3975 planets, a lot of which are free accounts/inactive. And yes, you need an alliance, really; more so than before, perhaps.
2. Legion died long ago. Fury also 'died' but sid made a new alliance, 1up which owned round 11, and owned round 12 even more. Wolfpack are stll here, currently ranked 5th. NoS are also still here, though not nearly as good as they used to be (they have a lot of new members i think), currently 12th. look on somewhere like www.pilkara.com for more details
3. Synthetic Sid is playing round 12, and played round 11. Don't know about the others but i think none of the others you mentioned still play.
4. Really can't help you there - but it's not the game you knew. Since round 5 we've seen the introduction of races, and later a fairly different system of play. A lot has changed.
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Unread 21 Dec 2004, 06:00   #16
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Re: About Pa-history

Quote:
Originally Posted by Neferti
A lot has changed.
No kidding. Apart from the races, there are now spies, buildings to construct(en mass as far as I can see), controlling other peoples ships(Ziko ships), delayed launching of fleets, reduced travel time for alliance members, more scans, new forums, scores/value/xp (which I really don't understand), different apod types. Phew! Too much to take in.

But are these changes for the better? Is it more fun to play?
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Unread 25 Dec 2004, 07:03   #17
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Re: About Pa-history

It is a matter of oppinion. You will find tree types on Planetarion community basicly:

- The ones who will say it is not fun anymore and dont play
- The ones who will say it is not fun anymore tho they play as if was (like to complain, dont like to admit, but in truth enjoy the game )
- The ones who will say it is fun and you should play

I believe the best people to tell you that is yourself. Try for one round, worth a try, if you dont find funny, just leave as some do. If you find, was a lucky bet
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