The whole point of the game is to get players to buy GP (aka profit for Dan).

oh, i dont know, to have fun? there is more to this game then pvp.

why do you think there are pve missions and enemies in the game?

Surely to kill those enemies you must be stronger than them, no? The whole game revolves solely around improving your Ship. If you can't see that, then you'll need to open your eyes.

While that's true, you're missing the point that people are making. A lot of new players are dumping all their rank points into decks, adding every ship-bot they get and thinking their "huge" ship with all its fancy modules is going to be tough. A reset comes along, pounds them right on their damage cap and takes a handful of badges. These new players are disabled when they log on and often get disabled soon after repairing. When you're disabled, you can't do any pvp, npc or many missions. Playing a game where you're constantly killed and subsequently can't do anything wouldn't be much fun I'd imagine.

Ship size is not a proportionate factor to strength lets take myself, 3600 decks with about 72k SS. Then we take Rahvin, we played the same length of time, started in the same legion, and he's well over 100k SS with all teh decks

You're talking about high ranks who know the mechanics of the game, not people who have been playing for a few weeks, maybe a couple of months. These are people who are relying almost solely on their researched hull modules (maybe durtanium plating at +90 hull each) but taking 200 damage per hit. The fact remains that these inexperienced people are getting hammered by resets and SSB slow rankers to the point of disenchantment.

While it may not effect you, it is slowly chipping away at the number of players.

I say this as a moderately heavy pvper with a kill/death ratio of about 10, not someone who is suffering the fate of those I speak on behalf of.

When I started the same thing went on, it's not that new. A man by the name of Darth Flagitious gave me some advice, disables don't matter. Maybe that should be imprinted on the day one banner

Some will be disenchanted by the kill number on their stats page but the problem as I suggested a few posts back is that some players will be continually disabled almost immediately after they repair. The more they get disabled, the more they are targeted until it gets to a point they are never in a position to do anything in the game. Unless you build up your combat rep early in the game, the game becomes almost unplayable.

The ability to opt-out of pvp before rank 100 would make the game inifintely more simple for new players entering the game. It would also make it infinitely less attractive for experienced players to reset and farm new players for badges.

I started out at around minus 600 kills to deaths up until rank ~200, things were playable

Cool, so some players persevere. The issue is for those who lose interest quickly. Numbers, are dropping, we know that. We need solutions to fix this, not just people who would rather stick their head into the sand until the game no longer exists.

This is true. All of the people on my FB friends list that play GL, I met in GL. I haven't been able to convince a single player that I suggested the game to to stay on past a few weeks.

^ Well said Ranqul.

+1 to an option to disallow pvp. When I was in high school many moons ago, I played a MUD (Multi User Domain) that was text based. It thrived throughout all of my high school years, college years, and even into grad school. Sadly, the game closed its "doors" a few years ago due to the creators wanting to pursue other endeavors. During that time, there were always fresh people creating characters and such. PVP was an OPTION there and it seemed to work really well. Once you were a certain level you could join a clan. Joining a clan meant pretty much the same thing as being in a legion on GL. The downside (or upside depending on your pov) to joining a clan was that now you were able to PVP. If you did not join a clan, you didn't have to worry about PVP and could just play the game as you wished. However, unlike GL, not being in a clan didn't put you light years behind your peers. There were plenty of uber strong characters that never set foot in a clan hall. With the current setup in GL, that just isn't possible. Anyone with experience knows that to have a good (strong) ship, you are going to rely on the output from a legion base especially in the lower ranks. As a true newbie, no one knows these things. If by chance they have the drive to make it any decent amount of time, they will be noticeably weaker than their peers. We need to figure out a way to immediately get newbie players involved in a legion or at least let them know that they should look to joining a legion ASAP. But there in lies the next problem. There are 500+ legions available, sure some of them are rank exclusive, but how is a true newbie supposed to know what legion will work for them? They can't. It will never happen, but the amount of legions needs to be consolidated. Maybe any legion with fewer than 25 members after 24 hrs would be disbanded and that legion would then be locked for entry (still can be found during base scans, but wouldn't show up on any recruitment or legion search function). I really enjoy playing GL and would hate to see it go, but the key to survival is bringing in new people and getting them to stay. It's the same with any business. Eventually everyone leaves or retires, but the business keeps on living because there are new people to take the place of those that have left.

The only thing needed is proper advertising.
We don't need to dumb things down for new players and turn this into "Farmville in Space".

It already happend, I think you dont realize how many freez rankers are there feeding of legions.
There isin't enough content for low ranks that people could stay for and keep playing GL.
Freez rankers and luck of content are the main things that put's off people that just started in galaxy, because they see someone so over powered that they can't be even bothered to spend so much time to be as good as the freez ranker. The luck of content... Allowing people to start npc at low ranks with good prices such as terraformes and rescued prisoners droping from npc's would allow people to upgrade planets faster resulting in those players starting like the game, as it gives something to them and allows them grow faster so they can explore game more.
The luck of good unoccupied planets, if someone would scan a Dyson at low rank I don't think they would quit.
I realize that there would also be increase in alts, thats why Dan should check more in low rank range for them.

If these players were to take the initiative, the collective knowledge and strategy of some of the games best ships are readily available. they would be much better than we ever were at a much faster pace.

If at the start a player had quick guides to, proper planet construction, effective ship builds and strategies on how to use them, coupled with a good start legion they will have an advantage over the old crew

+1 Rav advertising advertising advertising

I think that one of the more disappointing aspects of GL is not being able to drop a bad planet without having to spend GP. Everyone winds up with bad planets, especially new players who take the first planets that they scan. The new players get stuck with crappy planets and then they don't want to continue with the game.

This could be fixed if everyone was allowed to drop one planet per month with no GP required. It would give people a way to fix their mistakes in taking bad planets when they started the game.

I'm not sure about once a month as that seems too frequent, and Dan would possibly lose quite a bit of income that way... but certainly being able to drop a couple of planets for free wouldn't be a bad thing. Of course, you can always hope that you get GP from the daily reward to drop planets (I dropped 3 this way xD)

other point to consider:

I do prefer to read on this forum argues between newbies and elders trying to solve/advice... than the argues among elders, what is the result of again low number of new players. A big community of players with nice/major cut of fresh blood is simple the alpha requirement for a great game.

It's all boiled down to a single metagame, PVP with an SSB, unlock talth, reap the rewards of ever increasing arti production.

Frankly, as long as no balance work is done, it's going to remain that way.

Also, in my personal opponion, a lot of the early game artwork needs to be redone too; those cheap looking portraits of the starter races and wonky pre-alpha ship designs probably put on a bad first impression of the game's quality, making most people to read through a few pages of the badly outdated tutorial (which misses a lot, including the modern legion system (it references the pre-legion system where your legion was your friends list that also play GL)), spend the energy bar, play another game and never come back, completely missing the jewels that makes the game great.

Heck, the only reason I played past that stage was that I was getting coins for another website once I reached level 10 which was just enough time for someone to recruit me into a new legion and learn the ropes of the game to see past how convoluted the game initially looks to a new player.

TLDNR: Rebalance older/obsolete races/professions, redo the early artwork so the game doesn't look as "cheap" and give the tutorial a much needed update.