Quicker rounds?

[GrandAdm Thrawn]

Originally Posted by The Real Arfy

Just because the game is currently "european" doesn't mean we should enforce that.

why not take into consideration most players are european - the americans already have an advantage as noone attacks when they sleep anyways

so just make the ticks at 0 gmt, 2 gmt, 4 gmt, 6 gmt - makes a loss of 3 ticks each day whats not really much, but people get some sleep finally.

[zokka]

I Vote for shorter rounds though not sure I would want the ticks to be shorter. So long as I don't have to get up in the middle of the night just to check my attacks.

[Kal]

I'm assuming I still need to make sure there is no main round running over the xmas-new year period? fitting whole rounds into a year is harder than it might sound...

[Furyous]

they've already been well shortened. It often takes at least 7 weeks for a proper winner to emerge after all the warring etc.

I think that at the end of the day 10 weeks per round would be absolutely fantastic... if there were about 10,000 players. There would be loads of alliances, loads of players, and everyone would have a jolly good time.

However, that's never going to happen (again) so making a round last anything longer than 6 weeks is killing the game. It takes approx that long for the winner to be decided anyway, after that it's just a bit of mish-mash that nobody cares about and the playerbase starts to decrease after that through boredom.

I dont think a 1 month round with Half Hour ticks would do the game any damage, but I dont think we should change the format to this permanently. You know, like a vacation kinda thing.

The only way to keep rounds interesting is to keep them as short as possible. It's like a maths exam - give somebody long enough and any retard could pass. Or a 1200m race, even the fatties will finish eventually. You measure ability by setting time constraints, and victory should be awarded to the most able. Not the fat asthmatic kids with learning difficulties.*



*Planetarion: For when football would literally kill you.

[Barrow|Pony]

Originally Posted by Kal

ANother issue is development time, the more rounds we put in a year the harder proper development and testing gets. Would people be happy to move to a system where its onyl every other round that major changes occur?

...surely you jest.

[Kal]

Originally Posted by Barrow|Pony

...surely you jest.

7 week rounds effectly demnd 5 round sper year with 3 week gap from tick stop to tick start.

That means no time for public betas between rounds and means that speed games between roudns would need to occur on the beta server.

What this means is that thoose 3 weeks between rounds are effectivly dead time where nothing major can be tested.

This means no more public betas. Last 3 weeks of a round in private betas, first 4 weeks in coding. Given all the coders at the moment are part time and do PA stuff when they can fit it around their lives this leaves very little time to do anything. it also assumes that time doesn;t get taken up doing bug fixes etc on the main game.

If round to round we could cut the assumed changes down to bug fixes/tweaks and stats changes then this would free up time to concentrate on big changes every other round.

An added advanatge of short rounds is that we can potentially do more crazy things for a round than we can now, for example we could have private galaxies and no alliances for a round etc.