Community interaction: beyond galaxies

[ComradeRob]

I'm not proposing any specific idea, but inspired by this thread I'd like to see if other people have some suggestions to offer.

Galaxies are important to PA because they provide the incentive for community interaction - the first push to get people talking to each other. Being in a galaxy with someone breaks down the social barriers and gives you a reason to start a conversation with that person. Over time, friendships grow, and that is ultimately what keeps people playing the game. For a newbie, the galaxy is the first place that they can get this social contact (they might also try the forums, or joining random channels on IRC, but the galaxy channel is the only place where they can find people who have any interest in helping them).

However, galaxies are fatally flawed. Let's assume that each Planetarion player has an imaginary 'potential' rating, from 0-100. 0 is a complete inactive, 35 is a newbie, 65 is an average 'decent alliance' player who might finish top 100 if they're lucky, 100 is a player who has been ranked top 10 on several occasions. There is no way for the game to know what this potential is (it's an imaginary number that can never be quantified), therefore there is no way for the game to ensure that galaxies are properly balanced; a galaxy might have several 90+ potential players, or might comprise entirely of players in the low 20s.

Since galaxies are largely random, most galaxies will be in the middle somewhere. But there will be outlying galaxies which have a high concentration of very good players, and some which have a high concentration of no-hopers. The exile system reinforces this imbalance, but it's important to point out that galaxies are unbalanced before any exiles have taken place. In this respect, it's rather like the lottery of birth: you could be born as the son or daughter of a billionaire, or of a starving African peasant. You could land in a good galaxy, or a bad galaxy, through no merit or fault of your own.

I think it's fair to say that, after 18 rounds, no fair way of allocating galaxies has been found. A private galaxy system favours the enjoyment of the elite at the expense of the inexperienced; a random galaxy system risks trapping players in bad galaxies; an exile-based system solves that problem but ultimately forces players to continually self-exile until they escape their 'bad' galaxy; a buddypack system is a good compromise between random and private, but galaxies with dysfunctional buddypacks are doomed. The system is fundamentally unfixable, because there is no way of allocating teams fairly.

So, if we are to remove galaxies, what would we replace them with? The first duty of the new system would be to continue or improve upon the role that galaxies play in giving people reasons to talk to each other. Without galaxies, what incentives could experienced players be given to help newbies? What reasons would players have to cooperate with, as well as compete with, each other? What tools could we use to help people find friends in the Planetarion universe?

I have some thoughts on this and I might post them later, but I'm interested to see what other people are thinking (if anything )

[gzambo]

well u could take the above mentioned player ranking system and use that to make random gals but limit the total ranking score for each gal and hope to balance it that way , however with this being pa ppl will try to abuse it for their own benefit

[Timeline]

hmmmm
there possibly could be introduced a seeding system which is points based and the higher the rank the less points you have. eg #1 planet gets 1 point.
Each round the seeding system is updated and the seeds are attached to the email you sign up with. As credits are already carried over this way this shouldnt be a problem to track round after round.
when it comes to galaxies you have the base buddy pack and then randoms are added. If the bp gives a 'score total' from adding up the seeds then the randoms put into a galaxy would add to the total into a given score range. With this in mind the galaxies might be slightly more balanced and would place lower seeded players with the random higher ranks.

The problem with my idea is it 'could' force higher seeded players away as they will be forced into galaxies with lesser abled players

[ComradeRob]

It would also become a very good idea to have a multi account that does very badly, and thus gets seeded with a bunch of really good players for the next round. Already thought of that one

[Timeline]

thats where the mh team come in
ip's can be tracked and if two planets are on same ip and have an exception from the round b4 and end up in the same galaxy it would be highly suspicious and they would have the mh team all over them like flies on dog sh@t

[Jackie]

Or to have 2 email adresses using them with one round in between, so you never have a ranking 'point' and always end up with the good players.

[Timeline]

the passport system tbh would bypass that problem (once it ever gets sorted)

[furball]

Originally Posted by Timeline

the passport system tbh would bypass that problem (once it ever gets sorted)

It won't, ever. We need to think of ideas that don't depend on PA's future infrastructre.

[wakey]

Originally Posted by furball

It won't, ever. We need to think of ideas that don't depend on PA's future infrastructre.

Seconded. When PATeam was first put together in Round 4 the passport was one of our first big ideas. Now going into round 19 its still a cornerstone to PATeams thinking even though that original PATeam has all moved on long ago and its really no closer to happening that it was back then. I just dont see it happening and nothing should be done based around the belief it will happen



As for the actual idea here, its an intresting take but I have to wonder does it really acheive the desired effect if seedings are done on end ranks. I know end ranks are how we are viewed by the wider community but rankings only tell half a story of the persons personal skill or usefulness to a galaxy.

For example there are players whom are only ok players whom due to their contacts in a top alliance and top galaxy and thus achieve a pretty decent rank and there are others who are excellent players but havent had a 'top' alliance or galaxy and have acheived a fairly poor end rank. The high ranked player could hence be pretty useless as a galaxy mate while the lower ranked one could be a great help, always sending defence, arranging things for gal mates and offering advice to anyone else.

And also people and alliances situations and fortunes change. The higher ranked person could leave his good alliance or his alliance could become public enemy number 1 and hence his weakness really highlighted.

As such does this idea not just take a snapshot in time and then organise the univese in what is masquadrading to be a structured way but which due to the narrowness of the data is actually little more than a random universe structure?

You could reduce the circumstances situation a bit by increasing the length of data in the same kind of way the UEFA Co-Efficients in Football are done (The seedings for things like the champions league are decided on the Co-effiecients and these are based on your performance in Europe over the last few years, I think its 5 years but i could be wrong) but as that data hasnt been being collected we would have to put up with the current system for a good few rounds and even then I cant help but think the critera is too narrow to get a good distribution

[Timeline]

yeah the coefficient was the original premise for my idea...a possible way around the multi round wait would be to introduce a 'ceckpoint' at cetain times during the next few rounds and use them to calculate the standing...although admittedly this is flawed, as ranks dont change drastically unless a planet is involved in an alliance war

[Heartless]

There is also the problem of crashing your fleet. Since XP was nerfed that still throws you back into stoneage, rank-wise, no matter how of a player you are.

[ComradeRob]

Originally Posted by Timeline

yeah the coefficient was the original premise for my idea...a possible way around the multi round wait would be to introduce a 'ceckpoint' at cetain times during the next few rounds and use them to calculate the standing...although admittedly this is flawed, as ranks dont change drastically unless a planet is involved in an alliance war

I had thought that by beginning the thread demonstrating that galaxies cannot be balanced (with 18 rounds of empirical evidence on my side, no less) I might encourage people to think 'outside the box' a little bit. Suggestions for how galaxies might be balanced are simply doomed. The ingenuity of any suggestion for balancing galaxies will be easily overwhelmed by the combined brainpower of the PA community's efforts to abuse whatever solution is devised. Galaxies cannot be balanced, period. It cannot be done.

Are there any feasible alternatives to galaxies, that provide players with better incentives to work together without allowing a group of high-ranking players to gain an unfair advantage, or condemning some players to a disadvantage?

[jerome]

http://pirate.planetarion.com/showpo...49&postcount=7

[Little Timmy]

Jer has some very valid points particularly around the alliance remarks. Your also correct around the galaxy system which with an ever reducing player base will continue to cause problems.

I dont have any major solutions, however, to promote communication for new players you could almost create an in game alliance for the cluster. Which means that any player not allied in game automatically becomes allied to other players in their cluster who are not in a tag.With the usual reduced travel time ..etc etc ...it might encourage clusters to start to work again ...well at least for the new players or players with no ties.

[wakey]

Originally Posted by ComradeRob

I had thought that by beginning the thread demonstrating that galaxies cannot be balanced (with 18 rounds of empirical evidence on my side, no less) I might encourage people to think 'outside the box' a little bit. Suggestions for how galaxies might be balanced are simply doomed. The ingenuity of any suggestion for balancing galaxies will be easily overwhelmed by the combined brainpower of the PA community's efforts to abuse whatever solution is devised. Galaxies cannot be balanced, period. It cannot be done.

Are there any feasible alternatives to galaxies, that provide players with better incentives to work together without allowing a group of high-ranking players to gain an unfair advantage, or condemning some players to a disadvantage?

As you said in your first post though you need players grouped somehow and you need a common goal to get people playing together and helping each other out. These groups also cant be of the players choosing (ala alliances) if they are really going to work to any degree because the simple fact is that the when given the choice the top players will in most cases will be drawn to other top players.

Now it doesn't matter what you call these groups if there's a common in game goal and benefits to encourage the co-operation then the imbalance will be present. If you remove the common goal and benefit then you have no reason for people to co-operate. Even now while there is a benefit a large proportion of the playerbase only put in the least possible effort on the interaction front, if they put any effort in at all .

And thats the problem unless you reward people in game then they often wont be willing to help others and as soon as you reward people in game you make the groups imbalanced and I just cant think of any way around that.

[Wandows]

I'm not quite sure if the galaxies in itself are the problem. The current alliance setup basicly forces alliance players to be 'selfish' and not bother to much with their galaxy (apart from their bp and the active members of the gal). Also in the end the possible fleet interaction makes little sense for players to interact with ppl they in the end can't benefit from.

Going completely 'out-of-the-box' is quite hard i'd imagine, unless there is a way created where it makes sense for high-ranking players to invest their time in lower ranked ones. But assuming the goal is to increase interaction between unlinked (bp/alliance) players, this is something different:

What might be interesting would be forming clusters of planets around top ranked planets and have a sliding scale on size. For example a top 30 planet is able to link 2 top-30-100 planets to its own 'region', who in their turn are able to connect 5 top 100-500 players, who in their turn are able to connect up to 5 top 500-1500 players to their planet. Such a 'cluster' would have similar benefits to a galaxy. A planet can only be linked to one 'higher scaled' planet.

If a planet would get up in rank and get in the same scale as its 'parent' planet it would collide with its parent and break away from the cluster (or something) and get him to look for a new 'parent'. The 'child' planets linked to that planet would remain under its wing and move to the same new location.

There should be some overview ingame for a planet to see which 'parent' planet still has room and those planets can apply to the potential parent to be their child. Some restrictions should be set to the parent to avoid him being able to detach a child at any given time (to make selection process a bit more thoughtfull and 'force' the parent to ensure the new child gives decent support in its group). The benefit for a parent would obviously be a reasonably active group of players around him for protection. Also a parent cannot have allied parent planets as direct children (but a child of a parent can have allies of the planet as child (to keep it clear^^))

I know there are a shitload of flaws (and uncovered areas) in what i just put up here, but it was just something that came to mind to perhaps encourage others to think in different directions.

[jerome]

like all this matters, nothing will change.

[Little Timmy]

Originally Posted by jerome

like all this matters, nothing will change.

This is true also. Playing PA is a bit like playing spaceinvaders. Its really old but you keep trying to beat your high score.

[Cochese]

I was actually thinking along the same lines as jerome, though not with the alliance bit applied to it.

Just 'big clusters' or some sort of flat universe type setup, where "regional politics" could possibly (though knowing PA, probably not) evolve.