Planetarion Forums

Kloopy · 5 Oct 2006, 22:23

I have an IRC client full of private message windows this evening. I've been sat helping one or two people out in #beta and a number of people both in channel and in private have been saying how they dislike the stats because they have been raped and lost all their fleet.

Anyone who knows me would keep me away from defence organising in galaxies and refuse to play a round where I had anything to do with the stats... I admin my knowledge of the stats and combat planning, etc is dire.

So... I want correcting if I'm wrong but all these people complaining about how quickly and easily they've lost their fleets - claiming the stats are flawed - are unfounded for a number of reasons....

1) The Beta environment does not match the race balances of the real round because people wish to try out different races whilst they can to make a final choice for the main round.

2) Because the ticks are set at 60 seconds, just a 24 minute break for cooking and eating tea is equivalent to a day's inactivity in the game. Go out to the shops for an hour and you've been away almost 3 "days". Also, when at your PC you are logged in to the game for an artificially huge proportion of the ticks. This completely imbalances defence fleet organisation and attack landing.

3) Due to the inactivity of some planets, after they decide they've had enough of the beta or decide to do silly things like build fleets of just 1 ship type etc, you get planets dotted around the Universe that are in a state you don't often find in the main game. Thus you'll probably get more available targets.

4) There are far fewer players in the Universe and becuse of the artifical activity levels, combat is more concentrated on those few planets. Therefore it's harder to get defence.

5) Your whole alliance isn't in the game backing you up with defence. Even if you are playing with your friends, getting adequate defence in 2 minutes between fleet launch and latest defence launch is a difficulty.

So all in all, I really fail to see why people are upset about the stats from playing in the Beta. The beta serves as a playground for people to have a go at the using the stats and for us to test the combat engine is calculating as we intend.

So my question is... am I right or do the beta players indeed have a good basis for complaint?

[Flame avoidance: This is an entirely personal view and no single player has contributed towards my writing this.]