[Appocomaster]

If I attempt to reply to every comment here, the reply will be so long that I doubt many would reply.
Firstly, whilst I don't believe that all these criticisms are valid, some fair few are. What the game needs (and hasn't had since Round 10 or so) is one or more full time developers (though coders are also nice ). Whilst this in no way weakens the criticisms placed against Planetarion, it might be worth considering.
We haven't presented one vision and tried to push everything to conform to that. That's a fault I can't defend against. I'm not a visionary, and few people have submitted visions (JBG springs to mind), let alone ones that are feasably codable with our current coding resources (Cin, as well as myself infrequently). I'd gladly step aside, but in 4 years I've found no one willing to take the position of head of development, and few to even be around as a deputy!

@Some of the criticisms (mainly Light!)

Originally Posted by Light

Lets look at the resource system:
1. Metal was designed with the intention of being the resource to initiate roids and build NORMAL ships.
2. Crystal was designed to be the resource to build scans and EMP ships.
3. Eonioum was the resource for fuel.

Admins decided that fuel costs were wrong for the game so deleted them. What did they do with Eonoum? nothing. So admins made Eonioum redudent but then didnt care, they only had the foresight to get rid of the fuel costs.

They then got rid of the EMP/Normal tech tree, what did they decide to do the resource system? NOTHING.

They then got rid of the scanning and initating for roids system? Instead they replaced it with a simple system of it costs Metal to init Metal roids, Crystal for Crystal roids etc..

This made the 3 resource system COMPLETLY redudent, there is 0 reason for it.

Metal/Crystal/Eonium: Fuel cost was removed for aforementioned reasons. Scanning for asteroids was removed to make it more simple for new players, and to remove some randomness. The same is the reason why initiation costs were changed. Metal/Crystal/Eonium were kept to keep some variety between the races. We could have removed them, but that seemed to be oversimplifying (and would really have demanded one race, which, to be honest, we don't have the coding time for at the moment).
Anyway, all the other changes were for making things simple, which you seem to support in the formulae.

Originally Posted by Light

<lots of random stuff about research, construction,production>

The production/research/construction changes were to make things more interesting. Research queuing has been found useful by some, but I think a large number of people would argue that the possible change in production times has had a fairly significant impact on the game. The formulae are complicated, but not required unless you want to make extensive plans - all times have a current completion tick on them. As Mz has suggested, we can for example clutter up the population page with predictions on how long current research / construction / etc will change.

Originally Posted by Light

this expands to every single area of PA, its overly complicated and overly retarded. There is no vision in PA, so over the course of 30 rounds, things have progressivly got worse as admins code additions to the game which arnt needed or arnt thought through.

I'd argue that the alliance tax, alliance scan sharing, alliance defence upgrade, alliance attack upgrade, alliance fund, alliance intel, alliance merging, new quest system and bcalc were all useful additions to the game, and those which helped those less experienced most of all. There were issues with a few of the introductions (noticeably the new quest system), but are they all overly complicated or 'retarded' ?

Originally Posted by Light

6. Why did you implement new quests in the game? with no reward of intentive? what do these achieve except for confusing new players?

Because they were finished late and adding them in late would have caused even more problems

7. Why is the in-game mail you recieve when you sign up to PA and log-in a wall of text with no information,tips or guidence for new players.. instead all it does is inform players that they can upgrade there account.

The e-mail sent when you sign up contains lots of useful information, before you even log in to the game. It's not my fault you don't read it

8. Why in a war game? is it much more profitable not to go to war but to fence? Surely, in a war game.. war should be the most profitable and the combat code backs that up?

Experience? When we had too much, it caused hugely unbalanced gameplay, but it's still there and still benefits combat situations - it's the main source of experience.

9. Why is everything in the game so complicated and not explained? To work out the research points you'll recieve you need to visit 3 pages of the manaul and think of the formula yourself.. When in the original Planetarion, the most complicated formula was Amps vs Asteroid Scans.

Wrong, it was the combat formula. Also, answered above.

10. Why are there 5 different races? what did this add to the original game? or was they just added for an extra feature? Why not just 1 race with multiple tech tree paths?

Ask Spinner / Fudge for why they brought in races.

11. What is the point in constructions? Everyone (in the know) just spams Finance Centers for maxium benefit, even adding a cap on them does nothing, as everyone will still spam them until they reach the cap.

wasn't always the case, the cap helps somewhat. No one else has suggested a better setup

12. Why are research labartorys in the game? what do they add except make the research formula more complicated and force everyone to make there 1st/6th/11th/etc consutrction a research center.

not everyone does this, especially not near the end of the game. It's opportunity cost. The average amount of res labs in the top 500 is 5, with the most common being 2/4/3/5 (in that order), and 350 having 5 or less.

13. Waves? how does a new player attack people without proper access to scans? or how does a small alliance cope without dedicated scanners? simple answer is they dont do well at all.. Is there anything being done about this?

Like the landing scan, the quest of which gives you a wave amplifier?

No? as admins arnt concerned about new players or small alliances as they arnt the ones in #alliances.

Oh, sorry. you second guessed me and got it wrong. Stop being so presumptive (and wrongly presumptive).

14. WTF IS #alliances, why do some people get priority on how PA is run? Is it a simple your Ego must be this big to have an opinion?

No. Unless Asc has sent people in to wind everyone up, most people in #alliances have far smaller egos than top players. In the last rounds, this forum has been used far more than that. I said this already, but you may have missed that. Those long CH logs, I guess

15. Why is there 0 updates on the portal, The game might as well be dead as far as the portal is concerned, its updated once every 2months (or everytime theres a rollback) with crap. Wow, there was a creators hour? Do i want to sive through all the crap? no, but have you taken 5minutes to make a summary of the important things said? no, you've simply copied and pastied a log. bravo.

We remove all the nick changes, kicks, bans, etc from the log first *actually*
We update it more regularly than every 2 months, even apart from the downtime announcements. I take your point, though I'm not quite sure what we're meant to be filling it with. Most players seem to find it hard enough to read what we announce on the portal anyway, without us creating more announcements for them to read through.

17. Production? why can people hide there prod? WTF is the point in adding factorys to the game?

It's not "hidden" ever since we added it into the planet scan; variable production times (faster productions with an opportunity cost of other constructions)

18. Why is incluster defence -1 ETA? is there any cluster alliances anymore?

No, because alliances and galaxies seem to demand increasing amounts of loyalty. Perhaps if we had another fleet ...

19. Why doesnt prelaunch have any major penaltys against it other than being detected in a JGB?

JBG is pretty powerful, but not even he can detect all prelaunches.
As has been said, detection is a major penalty.

Sorry, I realise that some of these have already been answered.

I fail to see a summary of what Light is trying to get from her rant though - all I can get out of it is "remove things that I find too complicated when I read the formula page of the manual" and "remove things that I don't think have a point".
We could remove the population counter, as I'm not sure that's going anywhere these days. It doesn't seem to be going in a direction you want anyway, and your ego is big enough we have to pay attention to you :/