Since the new alert cap I realized something. There is no reason to have any of the little guys in your legion. They are to little to help you. You aren't allowed to help them. Most of us larger players have enough real players in our legions that losing anyone level 100 or lower won't make difference.

No negatives and the following positives:
1) No more newbies popping up in facebook chat to ask stupid questions because they were to lazy to search the forum.
2) No more little guys begging you to send them minerals/artifacts/planets
3) Less of the "Jane Smith just kicked a chihaua in Dog Walker! Join her to get your new pet!" and the 50 other stupid game messages you get on your wall from all these people.

I am sure there are a lot of other advantages to this. What do you guys think?

as i posted in the update discussion the legion alert level cap is more of a deturant for lower levels cause they cant get help from the higher levels to persuade others to not mess with them. i say leave the disable/hack/raid action limits in and dump this legion alert level cap. you will see more people joining the game rather than people that left cause they didnt have anyone to turn to to protect them. more new players = more incoming cash to dan to make the game better.

Newbies can send you planets you can't find cause you've maxed out your scanning abilities?

There is catch-22.. Newbies usually got so pissed off and usually left GL whenever they saw rank 200 came in and blow him/her out of space.. That is rather unfair to newbies.. Alert with range limit helps to address that so newbies only would see maybe rank 20 max fighters to come in to fight and those newbies would say, "Ok, I gotta rank up fast and beat the snot out of that rank 20 player! Let's burn some CC to hit 20 ASAP!!".. Unlike newbie against rank 200 and say, "OMG! Rank 200 bullies me!!! No way I can fight and win this! It's so hopeless! Screw GL!!!"

@Kao.. I still keep lot of young DOO members in my legion. I'm glad that they are learning how to handle the matter on their own and it encouraged them to team up.. We big guys are here to supply them combat artifacts to help them out and give them lot of advices how to become better fighters. They are there to cover lower rank realm where we, high rank players, are covering higher rank realm so DOO can have in all rank ranges. We like to help each other.. It definitely gives me no reason to dump young members..

Noc, that still doesn't give any reason to keep them. As I listed before, there are no benefits. Now people in an organized legion like DOO or PGL are different, our job is to help newbs in that particular group but you still see a negligible return.

I agree with you though, the game grows increasingly biased to the new player. I honestly can see a point where it won't make sense to play with any regularity. That happens with most facebook games though, you leave one and find a new one.

Only real tangeable benefit of those young players is to boost your legion bonus to 100% to strengthen your planetary defense. It would be nice to introduce some extra benefits of more legion members..

Perhaps.. Introduce fighter squadrons attached to our ship directly based on number of legion members? Larger legion members we have, more fighter squadrons we have to help us.. Maybe formula of fighter squadron strength = legion members * rank or decksize?

Like I said in other thread is to allow young players to share alert to ANYONE but still stick to restriction rule. For example, you see rank 20 enemy alert but you tried to click attack but it greyed out telling you that you are too high to attack.. That way, alerts will come back to keep you interested but you still can't fight exactly the same way as you are in right now. I would include togge able feature to allow us to turn on or off the out-of-rank range alert system whenever we prefer to listen in or not.

i would be ok with that one you get the alert but cant attack cause you are higher level but maybe still let them get hacked by the higher level.

Dan has made it clear that there won;t be any new additions to gameplay in the foreseeable future, only tweaks to current gameplay. I agree with that method but I don't agree with it being increasingly biased to penalizing regular/higher level players.

As I said though it happens with all games on Facebook and breaks one way or the other. World at War went to the big guys and no one joined it and shriveled up. There was another game (don't remember the name) and it went to the little guys. The big guys left, they were also the ones who bought credits so the game shriveled up.

Dan does a lot of work for this game and does an amazing job of keeping it updated. I don't see him letting it die anytime soon. Its just a matter of whether he decides to make it fun for the high level players or the newbs.

The change doesn't necessarily penalize solely higher level players (the range affects everyone). It greatly reduces the potency of large legions, which were becoming increasingly powerful and out of balance with growing players / smaller legions. This is a balancing issue, something that all games have to go through as real-world data pours in.

Nothing is permanent with these changes. There has to be enough time for concerns / praise to be filtered back from players before the next round of updates is suggested and implemented. Its a constant evolution in the right direction for everyone, not just one group of players. I think everyone can agree that having a large legion shouldn't be a requirement to play.

Regarding 'fun', it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.

Wouldn't you say that most high level players have more than enough legion members to hit this stat? I would imagine someone like you could dump half your legion and still be 100%.

Im one of the highest non CCers and iv never gone above 15%

I wasn't referring to Noc's level, when I said "someone iike you" I meant how many friends he has/ legion members.

I know I just wanted to brag

Eh? It's nothing to do with CC.. I had seen many players with 100+ legions and they never spent one cent. It's not hard to grow to 100 or more by "add me" method that cost nothing..

Red Cap is a fine example with over 800 legion members and he spent nothing or maybe very little.. There even is no way to increase legion size by spending money at all. Unlike most FB games that you can spend money to expand army size such as MAFIA wars and Castle Age..

The non CCers part has referring to my rank, for someone who has never spent a cent on GL im very high rank, infact I believe id be if 4th place if you were to take out those who use more then like 20 GP per month. I just like playing knowing that its harder then other people.

Ah ok gotcha. It shows that you played in GL longer than most of us. I would assume that if you play long, your legion would grow big slowly over time, wouldn't it? Again, the legion size completely depends on player's preference and it has nothing to do with rank, length of play and cc.. New player joins GL and can easily get 100 legion in very short time vs a player plays GL for 1 year and still have legion size of 1..

Actually this system hurts higher level players more than it hurts the lower level players because there's a LOT more lower level players (rank 80 and below) then there are higher level players (100+). IF a Rank 60 sends out an alert, odds are he's going to get a much bigger response than somone who is rank 150. Those guys are so few they probably know each other by name.

Fast forwarding to 6 months later.. There would be alot more players in rank post 100+ To design a game must have near-term future plan in mind..

Perhaps, but if the player base keeps growing they'll still be a lot of players in the 100 less category and as we level up to the 100 + you higher levels will have more to play with b

My actual plan is to be a twink. A twink is someone overpowered for their level. I'm going to do it by having massive RP/AP production. It's pretty high already (for my level) but my ship is ridiculously underpowered ATM by attempting to undertake the whole thing in the first place. I'm already somewhat twinked from artifacts but my ship module research is still ridiculously behind. As soon as I get 4 more terraformers, I'll be at a point where I can buy a dyson. I wish I had never used all my terraformers regularly now. The underpowered ship modules lowers my upkeep to ridiculous levels where I can pretty much buy any planetary structure I can research. Unfortunately planetary structures still take forever to research. I'm not getting a mining planet for quite some time. The reason I would want to be a twink would be the new notification system and the fact that being the biggest fish in the sea costs a bit too much.

PS: I usually dump the inactive players and start from the bottom up. Inactive players are more worthless than lower levels. It usually goes hand in hand though.