[Jibajav]

I've been an on again off again player throughout the age of PA and this is my first round back in a couple of years. I only joined R53 for the last 2 weeks to re-orient myself to the game and to get ready for R54, but the differences between now and the last time I played are significant. There are 2 big changes in this game I've noticed: 1) The inability to be at all successful by yourself and 2) The negative attitude of the community. Now I know the idea in the game is to make some friends and try to succeed together, but if you are not part of one of the top 3 or 4 alliances it seems there is no chance to do well. I hope to get discussion on new players and how to increase the player base of the game in this thread. First a bit of my history.

I started the game playing solo back in round 3 or so. After a break for a few rounds I again played solo for a while but then joined a small alliance. I was able to find success simply attacking on my own and then I found even more success in the alliance. Over the next several rounds and I managed to place in the top 200 consistently whether it was a small or large alliance. Even though I didn't make top 100 it was still a lot of fun. I'm not sure what changed since round 30 or so up until now, but finding targets to land on playing solo is all but impossible unless the goal is to get roids off of an inactive planet that is just above the bash limit.

Being part of a large alliance typically means that you need to be available 24/7 to respond to def calls and be quite active in selecting your targets, etc. Most new players aren't ready to dive in to such a committment and the information and politics can be overwhelming. I would think most would rather test the waters first, as I'm did this round, and not commit to any alliance for a little while.

Not being able to succeed in attacks without an alliance, the threat of exiling, and negative attitude, are a huge turn-offs for new players. Even to land an attack every other day would be an encouragement, but there is too much defensive coverage on any planet at or above my value/score. I've only landed a handful of attacks but mostly I have just been building a few more ships to almost land somewhere, which isn't all that fun.

Now I do enjoy being able to get defense and also to defend. I'm not saying defense should be discouraged. What I am thinking is that there may be too much of an emphasis placed on fleet size that a planet has since there is very little incentive to land with losses. If there was an actual battle, both sides would have losses, but there would be a victor. Here is where I was hoping to open discussion on the combat side of the game to shake up the xp and salvage to somehow make attacks more interesting. I remember reading on another thread to be able to spend xp on bonuses for your fleets which I thought may be worth pursuing.

I have also read on the other threads how most are annoyed with the 1-6am waves and how no one attacks during the day. I completely agree that that needs to be looked into, but personally I think the incentives for attacks/defense need to change versus, say, removing pre launch. If people were more inclined to have fleets out all the time, the pre launch issue would dissolve.

I also agree that attitude is a serious problem. I received several mails on my attacks in the short time I played like "seriously?" or "why don't you recall and save us the time?" plus others that were fairly hostile. I played Xan, My targets could not inc scan me, and I would land with no loss if they didn't receive significant defense. Is there something really wrong with such an attack? These weren't the top 100 planets either. They were simply above me a bit in score and value. Any player gets turned off from wanting to play if they are constantly ridiculed, especially if what they are doing isn't illogical and they are sincerely trying to get ahead in the game.

Other than the changing of the combat results with xp and salvage, I do have a radical idea for a change which will probably not be liked: what if alliances were scrapped and the galaxies were your team? Private galaxies could be formed but be limited in size to 15-20. I realize that eta and the associated research would have to change with that, but thought I would throw that out there for discussion too. My thought is that many smaller alliances/teams would encourage more competition, but I'm also afraid that if alliance size was reduced, many would still team up and we'd have virtually no change on the game.

I am entirely open to debate on this and trying not to attack anyone in particular so I hope I didn't give that impression here. I liked this game too much in the past to give up on it entirely. Thoughts?

Jibajav