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Unread 28 May 2009, 21:16   #1
carld
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A plea to the developers of PA

(cliffnotes at the end if you want to skip all this...)

To the creators/maintainers/developers/etc,

Round 31 has been, and will probably be remembered as, a gigantic flop of epic proportions. The amount of time and effort that went into balancing the races and ship classes was pretty much wasted. This round we saw gigantic FI/CO attack fleets that spent a lot of their time pecking away at tiny targets throughout the Uni. Alliances who sought to defend their members against these attacks would be forced to send 5+ fleet slots just to discourage the attacker so they could recall and attack again only two ticks later. Below are a few statistics taken at Tick 769 of Round 31:

Code:
Total Ships	498,161,003
Total Value	608.94 M    

FR/DE
Total Ships	89,630,858
Total Value	374.34 M

CR/BS
Total Ships	19,480,097
Total Value	157.82 M

Race		Amount        	Highest	T100	T200
Cathaar		401(23%)	1	~50%	~43.5%    
Xandathrii	500(29%)	7	~32%	~32.5%
Eitraides	183(10%)	16	~12%	~12%
Terran		374(22%)	37	~3%	~7.5%
Zikonian	238(14%)	47	~2%	~5%

What is incredibly discouraging is the laughable amount of CR/BS fleets as compared to FR/DE and especially to the FI/CO fleets. Looking at the race statistics, we see that hardly anyone was drawn to either the Etd or Zik races this round. 50% of the top 100 players (43.5% of the top 200) were Cat, and 32% of the top 100 players and top 200 players were Xan. Two races accounted for >80% of the top players in the Universe. Lo and behold, the primary attack fleets used by both of those races this round were FI/CO.

In an ideal game environment, you should STRIVE to achieve a BALANCED game where players are drawn to all races and all ship classes equally as they all have relatively equal pro's and con's. Instead, we saw Round 31 heavily favoring the Cat and Xan races and the use of FI or CO fleets. To encourage new player growth, and minimize player turnover between rounds you should be bending over backwards in order to achieve a balanced Universe. Extensive amounts of unit testing should be conducted with automated scripts to benchmark each race and their fleets in an attempt to give all players equal footing. A new player should not need to have a large Alliance at their fingertips in order to crunch all the numbers and figure out which race and ship class will be the power house. Experienced players will always have the advanced knowledge of tactics and teamwork that will be able to provide them with an advantage over other players. Number crunching should give more insight into tactics, but should not reveal such a ridiculous hole in gameplay mechanics.

Personally, I hope I'm just reiterating the major and obvious issues of this round and that the developers have already revamped their methods for creating ship stats. If that's not the case, then I'm hoping that something I've said will be recognized by the PA staff and they'll recognize the changes they need to make in order for Round 32 to be successful. Creating a better GUI for the game is great and I think everyone appreciates the work that's gone into making the website more user friendly, but all that is for nothing if the basic mechanics of gameplay are completely screwed.

----

Cliffnotes: Developers, spend a LOT more time running extensive tests on proposed ship and race stats before choosing the final numbers for a round. Make better unit testing scripts that can run thorough and varied battlecalcs to generate outcomes. Verify that fleets of relatively equal value are relatively equal in abilities. Make all races and ship classes a viable choice to a successful round. We don't need another experience like this again.
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