[Discuss] Fix the economy, fix the game. Here's how.

[Dr_Rick]

I've played planetarion from rounds 1 through 7 and then I quit because it was going down the tubes. I just happened to decide to come back and take a look a few weeks ago and see if they fixed it or if it was dead and gone. It was just as speed game 2 was finishing and I was somewhat impressed by the fixes after relearning the game. I played speed game 3 quite seriously and finished in the top 10. And I realized something. The game is still defective because it stagnates after about 800 ticks. (You could say that by about tick 200 of speedgame the universe represented maybe around tick 500 of a normal game. By tick 800 the game was not healthy. There was a severe inequity between the bottom tier, worst planets, and the second tier planets who feed on them. The bottom tier never lost enough roids to ininitate more, or for the most part didn't play since they had 'lost' already. So basically the third tier players who attack second tier players had no targets. So the sat around and attacked eachother, all while the 4th tier, the top 100, attacked them and gradually wiped them out one by one. But when they got hit they were no longer competitive enough to recapture roids from their own tier, and the tier below them was virtually non existant. They had nothing to do and they quit. I saw my galaxy go from 8 active players to 3 because of this, and for the most part they were never even attacked, we defended them against sucessfully against well over half the incomings.

What can be done? Actually, Speed game 3 answered that too. Although the jump was probably too huge, it really revitalized the game. And it was painfully simple. They added roids. Thats the problem with planetarion. The roid ininitation rules always force the universe into a 0 sum game, and yet ships always increase in number. Eventually the ship to roid ratio becomes such that it is a negative benefit to capture another roid, as there is more firepower guarding it then it is worth. Many people are probably aware of this on various levels. There have been countless attempts at correcting the problem, some rejected (friendly fire, upkeep), some tried and failed (fuel), and some things have [in]directly improved it (25% constant cap, removed uninitated roids,, more destructive battles that happen during only one tick, less defence, and 1 target ships that allow exploiting type weakness for 0 loss roids, and best of all, getting rid of PDS-the most unhealthy stagnating idiotic idea that ever lasted 3 rounds)

But the most dirrect solution to the problem is targeting the very source. Roids are too finite. Regular equal infusion of roids into the game would do wonders for the economy. It will turn planets into better targets. Launching attacks make the game fun. You need to have good targets for that to happen, and the only way that continues is when there is a continous upward mobility in the roid 'food chain'. In the rounds past that were viewed as sucessful in spite of numbers other problems, that I will admit, have mostly been fixed, the economy of the game stayed healthy because of constant influx of newbies (and farms). But we don't need to have that to replicate the effect of a healthy economy. So here is my suggestion. Its 2 part, the first, being the most important, and the second part also improves the game and help insure the first one works well.

Give every planet in the game a new, free asteroid every 2 ticks (alternating types of corse so that m/c/e ratio stays equal). Planets auto spawn asteroids. Its simple. That adds up to 12 asteroids per day, 72 asteroids per week.

Stop the deletion of inactive planets. Let them be ownerless farms. They can provide a host of bountiful targets for the second tier players who currently have no targets. Now they can engorge themselves silly on easy targets. In the process they become nice targets for the tier 3 players and the effect carries on up to the tier 4. And now that the bottom planets have such a constant amount of roids even if their owner hasn't played in a while, they will stockpile tons of resources. More then enough that a person could come back to a planet after two weeks of not playing and build a nice fleet and begin to have some fun roiding the other bottom planets who arent active, and easily become a tier 2 player, and maybe even a tier 3. Instead of deleting a planet after a week, having the owner come back and discovering the planet is gone, and never playing planetarion again, you can send inactives an email after two weeks telling them about the resources stockpile they have and bounce them into a 'fresh start' galaxy for returned inactive planets where they have a chance at a fun game. (because they were probably in a totally crappy galaxy before, or got exiled into one when they went AWOL). Also, you need some kind of auto teching that isn't as fast as norman manualy but happens passively. It can be as however you like, but its important that someone who joins late or takes a hiatus can still compete. against people who have battleships, if he never researched anything, he'd be stuck with fighters.

Automatic roid generation will fix the games economy. I just wish there was some way to show just how much weight I am putting behind this theory.

[The Real Arfy]

I like the idea of roid 'injections', and yes you make an excellent point about roids becoming too expensive for ship losses.

There is however a flaw with your solution with respect to planets.

"Stop the deletion of inactive planets. Let them be ownerless farms." - Good idea, which I would enjoy seeing. However, they have to have a home in the universe, and to keep them in galaxies with hard working players is unfair.

The rest of the post is fairly stable in its argument, and if we could keep giving roids into the universe it would be fantastic.

One idea may be to have bot planets. They initiate up to 200 roids and build a suitable fleet for defence. I'm sure a cluster of bots may be quite interesting, if they could be programmed to get defence for one another and so on, that would be awesome

[Kal]

Originally Posted by The Real Arfy

I like the idea of roid 'injections', and yes you make an excellent point about roids becoming too expensive for ship losses.

There is however a flaw with your solution with respect to planets.

"Stop the deletion of inactive planets. Let them be ownerless farms." - Good idea, which I would enjoy seeing. However, they have to have a home in the universe, and to keep them in galaxies with hard working players is unfair.

The rest of the post is fairly stable in its argument, and if we could keep giving roids into the universe it would be fantastic.

One idea may be to have bot planets. They initiate up to 200 roids and build a suitable fleet for defence. I'm sure a cluster of bots may be quite interesting, if they could be programmed to get defence for one another and so on, that would be awesome

tbh any inactive planet that actually gets deleted would probably have been allready roided to the ground, and if u had regular roid injections there would be no need for theese farms.

[Cannon_Fodder]

Originally Posted by The Real Arfy

I like the idea of roid 'injections', and yes you make an excellent point about roids becoming too expensive for ship losses.

There is however a flaw with your solution with respect to planets.

"Stop the deletion of inactive planets. Let them be ownerless farms." - Good idea, which I would enjoy seeing. However, they have to have a home in the universe, and to keep them in galaxies with hard working players is unfair.

The rest of the post is fairly stable in its argument, and if we could keep giving roids into the universe it would be fantastic.

One idea may be to have bot planets. They initiate up to 200 roids and build a suitable fleet for defence. I'm sure a cluster of bots may be quite interesting, if they could be programmed to get defence for one another and so on, that would be awesome

inactives in good gals usually get exiled.

bot planets have several threads, try reading them...

[The Real Arfy]

Originally Posted by sniborp

bot planets have several threads, try reading them...

I have. My reply was on topic though and was a valid point.

[Goafer LX]

i think inactive planets get roided pretty quick...
also if there are no planets weaker tha u to attack.. organize an alliance attack and get someone BIGGER, i mean, i like to play it safe and attack smaller guys, but if u do that ALL the time , where is the fun???

[Dr_Rick]

This isn't bots, its making roids more like resources so that the in game economy stays sustainable and fun a lot longer. If you dont play for 3 days, your planet will continue producing resources on its own. So why not have it also continue to spawn FREE asteroids?

To those of you who think the game can somehow be fixed by making or forcing people attack up rather then down, you are missing the whole point and you cant see the problem. Its the same shortsightedness that demands PDS. The whole game is like an ecosystem. Roids are the energy that moves up. Big planets dont get biger by taking roids from eachother, they can only get bigger by getting roids from below them, where they will hopefully eventually get replaced by roids those smaller people took from people even smaller then them. And the even smaller people got these roids by taking them from the very smallest planets who still ininitate roids, the producers; the plants of the ecosystem. But the game sucks for these bottom level producers, its hard and disheartening, and thousands of them quit. But those are the players the whole game is dependant on.

The point here is to make roiding very easy for the not very skilled or active players who are normally near the bottom. If they even produce ships they will become secondary targets, because the smallest roiding planets will chose to attack other targets, the fleetless inactive planets who have some roids that keep growing. It will give the people at the bottom of the game the perfect enviornment to get experience, and actually do roiding. They have hundreds of easy targets to attack, and for the most part, other people will avoid them until they get too big, favoring the easyer targets instead. They can grow.

And it does another important thing. Most people would say the game is no fun if they get attacked more then they can attack. I dont blame them, that makes for a pretty boring game of futility. But the whole mechanics of the universe demand that for every person who attacks more then he is attacked, there must be someone else who is attacked more then he attacks. This changes that, because there will be people who arent playing but get attacked, and it wont really count for a miserable experience. (what happens outside their 72 ticks old news is unknown to them)

And of corse it helps keep players to not delete their planets, because they can take some time off and then come back. You ought to keep this idea on its own for its potential to save a few players from your dwindling playerbase. But these two changes will make the whole universe fun, and probably AT LEAST DOUBLE the time it takes for the universe to stagnate.

Just remember: Stagnation is caused by the average cost of captureing a roid being greater then the value of captuing a roid. Roids have to move up. Someone has to produce roids for them to move up. Why not make the production part involuntary?

This will

• stop stagnation
• make getting bigger easier for everyone the lower they are
• Drastically lower the number of attacks on the playing newbies
• Increase the level of fun for the small and newbies
• Increase player retention

[Phil^]

decreases the time until planets hit the roid research limit.

Edit:
The reason the research limit is there in the first place is to curb exponential growth - you can grow theoretically exponentially up to a point, but then the resources you gain per tick hit a maximum.
If every planet gained roids, it would mean the point at which the limit kicked in would have to be higher - meaning planets can grow exponentially for longer and create a bigger gap between bigger planets, and smaller planets.
and once a planet is past the research limit, additional roids are useless for them - all it would do is make them a better target.

Ive got mixed views on this one

[MAdnRisKy]

I have to say i like it and I like and agree with the reasoning behind it

[TheBerk]

i like the idea, but phil has raised a valid point, its happened with me where ive capped more roids from an attck than i can mine, these roids are pretty much useless, especially when ive had a long research ongoing (final travel time etc) and also attracted unwanted attention from bigger planets . these continually incoming roids will (possibly) eventually be unwanted and/or a liability.

[Dr_Rick]

I would say that roid celings are a failed attampt at curbing the prolem that this change will entirely fix. There is a name for slowing down the game. Its called stagnation. If good people get enough roids that they have to wait before they can have any use of captureing more, guess what they do? No it isn't nothing, its defence. And when you have a group of people who don't attack, but rather devote their fleets to defence, even though they may be a little closer together in score for a while, the smaller people who lost their roids to them now have a showballs chance in hell of recaptureing them. And lets say they wanted to use their supposedly greater skill and alliance (that somehow allowed them to loose up to this point) to get ahead. There are only two ways to do that, the first is to get even more roids and keep them so they grow faster and wind up ahead (which roid celings block) and the second is to attack the bigger people and move into their place by taking their roids and loosing them fleets. But the roid celing by way of forcing increased defence days also makes that impossible. The scores are arbitratly closer so it even seems like success, but in reality the planets are even further apart from ever having a chance at switching positions.

[Phil^]

Stagnation also occurs when the top planets are MILES away from anyone else - so much that they arent a threat.
this is what the research limit is to prevent - it forces the top planets to be much closer together and more competetive
giving everyone roids wont solve this when exponential growth is involved

You say its a failed attempt - have you tried asking people if they thought r11 or 12 stagnated?
I believe you'll find its Much closer, even towards the end then before

Stagnation can also occur in other ways - such as alliances blocking up massively and not de-blocking when one side is defeated, see above about the smaller planets not being a threat to the bigger planets.

Your idea IS an interesting one, i`ll grant you that but im not entirely in favour of it personally.
I think more discussion needs to be done on it here

[MrPedantic]

Thats true, r11 and 12 in particular were EXTREMELY close towards the end, not a whiff of stagnation compaired to older rounds

[Dr_Rick]

I would say that it was much more a function of the alliances choice's that resulted in that situation. Again I would say that it results in closer percieved scores, but the actual difference between two groups, one trying to get roids, and the other, only needing to protect them is miles apart. And lets not even bring up the whole score whoreing problems that occour when people no longer win based on their worth, and have a little bit too much free time because they have maxed their roids.

It also keeps the top closer to the bottom. You say thats a good thing, I say that they are no closer, as they won't ever overtake them. But they can still attack eachother. And thats something the less skilled/active players dont need. Why can't we have a 'major league' and a 'little league' defined only by how well they have done in the game up to this point, and only firm as long as people continue to perform at the same level. People who do better move up and people who do worse move down. The 1/3+ rule attack rule would protect the small people from the professional huge ones, and you can have a game where people can have fun competing against players of a similar level. I would say some people would rather play a game where most of the attacks aren't launched at 3AM and it always takes cordination to have success. Stratification is normal and I would say healthy. I'm sorry to have to tell you this cold hard fact of life, but 99% of the players are destined to be the bottom 99%. Everybody can't have a chance at being in the top 10, because most do not have the skill. Its sad that they havent learned this by now.

The primary benefit of this change is not even for the very top, who can literally choose wether to have fun or not by their actions of power blocking and fence sitting. The primary benefit is to the medium, small and tiny players because the players significantly better then them move out of their league the people they compete with are more of a fair match, and they always have pleanty of targets and the ability to grow that affords. You can look at the top 100 and say 'There are 10 planets there with 1/4 the normal roids for their score, see the game isn't stagnant', but I say 'Look for the planets 1/10 their score... THERE AREN'T ANY!' There are all these people who don't do well, and can't have fun because if they get any roids they are instantly stolen, and they all get pushed into a lump at the very bottom, as they all stop playing. If you don't see that as a problem......

[Phil^]

thats not what im pointing out as the problem - please read my posts carefully.
your idea of giving everyone roids at a regular basis is interesting but has its problems :

Why should the top 10% or so of players rocket away at the top without giving those who havent been able to get the 'perfect start' due to work concerns or whatever a chance to catch them and win.

Why should the game be over for them as soon as it began because they couldnt stay online 24/7 religiously to follow an absolute tick plan to get the best results.

giving roids away is easy to do, and suggest, but you fail to consider how it could impact the rest of the game or give a way to counter it.

You argue for a return to a two-tier system - either you play religiously 24/7 and stand a chance , or you dont.
I believe this is the wrong way to go.

The research limit is the primary thing which would hit the players - Altering it means an increase in the old exponential growth of the start

Now given you havent played since r7, you cant have watched the fluid gameplay in r11 and r12, plus all you saw was SG3 from what i can read from your posts.
That one speedgame does not define everything PA has become. For a start everyone was given resources and research from the start - the start no longer mattered.
infact the speedgame itself didnt matter massively so people didnt play it 100% seriously as they would a normal round.

You also have failed to take into account just how significant a part XP can be.
Roiding someone is one thing, keeping the roids is another
You can roid someone, get roided and roid someone else endlessly, all the time gaining XP from each attack - which directly contributes to score.
If the 'old style' score was in effect - roids would be MUCH more important then they are now - thats not to say they dont matter, but with Value as 'Score' stealing, and keeping those roids becomes much more important.

this XP componant was introduced specifically to combat this - Someone who has had a good round, attacking successfully , only to have a stroke of bad luck and find their fleet wiped out may very well at this point have quit if XP wasnt in the game.
With XP, they dont go right to the bottom - they drop a fair way yes, but they are not instantly a farm for everyone else.

Now, adding more roids into the game is an interesting idea. it means more resources, meaning more ships and bigger battles
However unless a way is found to get around the research limit, without increasing exponential growth adversely, the idea may very well be dead in the water

[Dr_Rick]

Why should someone who is less active and plays less seriously win when there are other people who virtually devote their lives to the game? It does not make sense. You appearently want a game thats 'fair'. But its not fair when the rules don't make sense. Everyone does NOT have the chance to win at any point after the start of the round. If they did it would be absurd, they ought to scrap the game and just have a raffel, thats fair. Fair enough for you?

People will always have the chance to win NEXT round if they play it as seriously as it takes and give up normal life. Thats the whole point of rounds, to give everyone an equal chance starting from nothing. But the majority of players won't win their current round, the next round, or any round ever. Sorry, thats just the way it works. If you cant handle that, maybe this isn't your game, so perhaps you should try something else like maybe solitare or minesweeper.

People need to be able to take pride in doing well on their own merits, and just have fun. To be able to say "I finished in the top 37%, that pretty good considering I got attacked bad five times because I don't play at work or stay up past midnight to play or even have an alliance"

I think stratification is good. It was one of the most notable thing about the famed round 2. There were many thousands of players(in fact most of them did) who joined afer the start. They just kept creating higher and higher clusters to put them all (and at 25x25 clusters were already huge) Clusters 1-30 were the starters, and soon there were 50 and then 80, and 100 and 150 clusters... I dont remember where it stopped. But I was in the first 30 and it was considered bad taste and newbie bashing to attack planets in the 100s cluster. But I knew a group of guys who I invited to play the game and they formed a little alliance and were all out there, and they had a grand time attacking and defending and getting 'big' (like 1% my size) They had no chance at winning, and they knew that, and yet the game was fun anyway. C100s were the little league. Players who weren't the top for a number of reasons, from a late start, to no knowledge of the game, no alliance, crappy galaxys... I can go on. The point is, there were 30 or so top clusters, and then there was everyone else. Everyone else didn't have fun because they won, they had fun in spite of 'loosing'. In fact, probably the people that I would say were the most likely to not have fun were in the 30 'winning' clusters. The people who bitched and moaned about thiefs this, pds that, Game(and everyone else at the very top) taking donations, the server problems messing them up, alliances being too powerful, the GDF was stupid.....

I don't care about the very top. Frankly, they could all go away and the game wouldn't be any worse.(many would say it'd be better) Heck, if the game lost the top 1000 players, and the bottom 1000,every round since round 2, there'd still be over 100k players today. No, I think its far more important to have a game that is fun for all the players in the middle. Where super serious players with huge powerful alliances left them alone. Tiers, or stratification naturally does this wonderfully. The players sort themselves out into different levels by their level of play, and so they are competeing against players whom they have a chance against. And if they are really skilled, maybe a member of the top alliance and he got his fleet crushed and roided into the ground. He could quickly regain his position because he'd be against players with a healthy amount of roids who aren't in his league and he would quickly grow right back to where he belongs, near the top somewhere. The bottom players wouldn't have to face his 3am attacks any more, and they'd be able to contine growing and having fun. Its not so much as a two tier system as a continus spectrum, something we've not really had at all since the shrinking playerbase. Its something you can really only have if there is room in between the top and the bottom. Exponential growth provides this room. When you artifically try to push everyone close to eachother, it only results in the natural tendency to stratify going awry. You get a lot of players packed at the top, but a whole lot more players squished into the very bottom, and nothing in between. If they grow, they are automatically stomped right back down to the bottom because the middle is so empty, they are the only targets for the bottom of the top to hit, And its very hard for them to grow at all because there are so many ships and so few roids in the bottom. And if your willing to be serious, there is no chance of them roiding the big planets, they are small for a good reason, (galaxy, alliance, and activity)

Hating stratification is like hating the little league. Trying to fix it is like abolishing it and then forcing affirmative action for worse players. It puts them in a situation where they dont belong and they don't have fun. Or you can screw up the rules even worse to make it 'fair'. Maybe their points are worth more then better player's. And they get special advantages too. But at some point you realize the ininital change was a stupid idea, and every subsequent change designed to fix the problem, but didn't even come close to working was also another mistake. You don't make the game good by making it fair, where fair is everyone does the same reguardless of skill, (thats how you make the game pointless and stupid) You make it fun by having a set of uniformly applying rules that make sense, and letting the people play on individual levels. And you can have all that in a massive multiplayer online game if you let people acomplish any level of personal success that they want to work towards, not with only the top 10 as the only definition of success, the be all and end all.

[noah02]

crikey i read all phils and i am happy with the reasoning but i aint reading another 100 lines+ and thinking about it sg3 also had infinite roid mining and no limit but the normal game does.

[MrPedantic]

Dr-Rick , just admit it - your idea got owned.
As Phil^ pointed out - if you can come up with a way to stop exponential growth then it might have a chance but putting the game back into the dark ages in terms of player seperation is not the way to go.

[Goafer LX]

i'm sorry, although it was a valiant effort, and i can see some very good points, as an overall idea, i just dont think its that good
sorry mate

[MAdnRisKy]

sorry Phil maybe I;m missing something here but I don't see how you two are actually in opposition.

the research limit ceiling could still exist and yet you could maintain the convayer belt of roids. this is something that xp ALLOWS! Roids have two functions now, one is resources which increase value and ammount of ships (and thus has an impact on who you can hit) and also in increasing XP when you steal them.

As Rick points out, one of the problems of the dwindling player base is the loss of grass roots generation of desired product. what i mean by that is say look at an eco system, basic source of all energy is the sun, which feeds the plants (there are lots here) which feed the herbivors (there are some here) which feed the carnivors (there are few here). Now assuming you look at biomass here, this has to be a pyramid. The problem is that the bottom of the pyramid get bored and bugger off and then everything falls down.

If this game is going to work you are going to have to find a solution to this. And I have to say that this is one of the better ones I've seen propossed.....

[Phil^]

basically its that rick would like a system where the top players are miles and miles away from anyone else, and the rest of the players stand no chance of ever touching them. - this is what im opposed to.

[demiGOD]

Originally Posted by Phil^

basically its that rick would like a system where the top players are miles and miles away from anyone else, and the rest of the players stand no chance of ever touching them. - this is what im opposed to.

it occured to me that the top players' scores might not be that far off the T90% even with the roid limit or 'ceiling' effected by our current tech-tree system -

if roids 'injected' exceed the roid ceiling, then the number of exceeded roids should (but i may be wrong) become 'invisible' variables in the equations and formulae of score, size and value - meaning even with the continuous growth of a top planet, their scores and values will not increase because they're over their roid ceiling -

but, what if a top planet's roid count becomes too abundantly far off his roid ceiling that the only way to bring back his roid count below his roid ceiling (to where his roids come back to the value and score formulae lowering down his score) is to launch *50 or 60 hostile fleets on him? top planets have just become absolutely invincible --

hmmm.. the suggestion is really interesting, if there was a way to decrease the score of a hideously roid-fat planet even if his roid-count is over his roid ceiling - then this idea would work

*number of fleets are just random numbers