[Mzyxptlk]

The private/random galaxy system is not nearly as big a revolution as everyone seems to think it is. The only thing it changes is time. Last round, it took a couple of hundred ticks before the good galaxies got all the players they wanted and started to dominate. This round, all the good galaxies were already fully formed at tick 12 and could start farming less active galaxies right out of protection. This is really the only difference between this round and last and I don't think it actually changes all that much.

The real reason the current system doesn't work is that private galaxies have something random galaxies don't, while the opposite is not true. That thing is "more active players in the galaxy". No random galaxy has 6 or more people online at least once every day. Almost every private galaxy does.

While it's possible to roughly balance the two (we don't need 'perfect' balance, Monroe), there is still no actual difference between the two. In fact, if the two were more or less balanced, most of the really active players would (and should) go random, and hope they end up in an above-average galaxy, because random galaxies (due to the impact of luck and size) will always have a larger standard deviation than private galaxies. After all: being lucky takes very little effort.


Rob's suggestion (private galaxies without and random galaxies with intag defence) would work much better because the two are truly different. Private galaxies get a lot of active players ingal, but they can't get alliance defence. Random galaxies get fewer active players ingal, but potentially have an almost unlimited alliance defence pool.

A while ago I thought Rob's system would discourage recruitment, I have since come to the realisation that this is not the case. In Rob's system (we need a better name for it), private galaxies will be comprised mostly of hardcore players. These would be the only people for whom being allianceless could work out, because they are the people with the connections required to stay off of targeting lists, as well as the only people active enough to send defence not once, but several times a night. Not coincidentially, these are also the people least likely (in the current system) to recruit total newbies to their alliances, because of their high entry criteria.

On the other hand, less active players could not afford to be allianceless, because they have neither the connections nor the time to stop large incomings and, naturally, they are also more likely to recruit other people who feel the same way, namely the few new players PA gets.


Rob's system also happens to be one of the two systems that attempts (though only partly, and perhaps not intentionally) to address the issue of the clash between galaxy and alliance interests. It does so by ensuring that the hardcore part of the player base, for whom galaxies are most important and who are thus the ones who are most often confronted with conflicts of interest, no longer have to take alliance interests into account. Of course, random galaxies would still have to deal with it.

The other being the no-galaxy system as proposed by Heartless and me. (I just reread the log, god, we are so clever.)