Once upon a time I found a terra planet I was going to colonize at when my level allowed it. A level 2 found it and colonized it within a day of my discovery. He has logged in once... ever. Didn't even build anything.

Also when you hack a bunch of planets at lower levels, you are pretty screwed when your whole list is full of occupied planets that are worse than useless... It makes it hard to even scan for more

A different solution would be to not allow planets to be taken at all.
Why involve them in combat?
What I see from the comments here is that you have a lot of folks that have the ability to scan for planets and for some reason managed to find some that were occupied (even though 79% of the planets are supposed to be unscanned) and now are "drooling" to mess up the beginning/weak player.
Another way is to not count occupied planets against the scan success percentages. There would be no penalty for finding an occupied planet.. just no benefit either.
You could alternatively get rid of the level 20 limit entirely. Just don't let a planet be attacked by someone who is within a range of levels of the owner unless that planet had been previously owned by that person at some time. Level 4 players could then take other level 4 planets but a level 20 person couldn't take a level 4. Good planets would slowly migrate up in levels...
If a level 100 owned a planet, a level 90 or level 110 could take it.. but a level 80 or a level 120 couldn't.
You can't own enough planets in this game to make it so easy to lose them in combat and so expensive to develop.
Is the joy / entertainment meant to come from hurting others or is it the mission cycles? There's a really fine line there to keeping this game enjoyable. It's no fun being pk'ed. Games like that are lacking in merit. There isn't a map to control. Just planets.. pvp combat at all shouldn't be there.
Now automated computer vs player.. woot

Untrue, some low levels holds terras and probably even exotics. Would be bad if all those rare planets are held by low levels when higher ranks have no way of taking it until the owners reach a much higher rank. That of which may need weeks, if not months

No, on so many levels. Planets are meant to be fought over, deal with it. And if your finding colonization too expensive, get some more mineral intake. And PVP is mostly plain PVP, not planet PVP.

Very happy to see the new 2 week/rank 20 protection status timer! One question though - If a rank 15 player were to attack and somehow steal my megacheese dyson planet from me (not like I have anything better than oceanic.. I can dream!) does that protection still apply?

i would hope that would instantly invalidate the protection!

A rank 15 can only invade once their "invade" protection is over.

Wootzorz

Would have been nice if they had the option to invade any time and cancel the protection, but what do I care, I'm way past that. So... Wootzorz+1

RE: Untrue, some low levels holds terras and probably even exotics. Would be bad if all those rare planets are held by low levels when higher ranks have no way of taking it until the owners reach a much higher rank. That of which may need weeks, if not months

You are making the assumption that the low level player isn't benefiting and enjoying the game by having that planet. Is there really not that many decent planets out there that you have to steal from lower level players? What incentive is there to ever improve a planet (terraform)? If you do so, it just makes it more attractive to slimeballs that want to steal it. And with 600,000 planets and a way to have it wiped from your scan list, the probability is extremely high that you will never scan your own planet back again. All you might be able to do is to try to hack the super high level player.. but you can't do that unless you can disable them.. and with a really big lead, new players versus old players aren't going to be able to stand a chance to ever recover their planet.
And with a scheme like that, a planet wouldn't sit at that level. As new players move past it, they'll have a chance to see it and fight over it. When / if it ever gets to your unbalanced level, yes, you can fight over it too.. until that time you'd just have to live with the other 600,000 planets out there. Buy a scanner already.

1Theres plenty of decent planets its just why should we run around everywhere when theres one right next to us waiting to be taken?
2If yours gets fuxxed, like you said scan for more
3If its taking you longer then 4 days to get to rank 20, YOUR DOING IT WRONG
4 If they dont have motivation, we wait 2 weeks. Then they will have motivation.

You're also making some assumptions here... I've scanned 82 planets in 60 levels. Never found anything better than oceanic, and only one of those. There really AREN'T that many decent planets out there. There's not much incentive to terraform either, those artifacts are just too rare/expensive. If I find a juicy terran planet that I think I could take, damn right I'm going for it. I'm very glad that inactive (or just plain slow) players can't waste them now.

/concur

i NEVER said low levels do not benefit by having a good planet. I am just saying that would be unfair if their planets are immune to those higher ranks or lower ranks. Wouldn't it be a bad day if you scan a dyson thats undefended and you couldn't even attack it due to rank restriction? It is not WRONG for ANY RANK to hold good planets.

Hacking does not need you to disable/attack anyone. You can hack ANYONE assuming you meet the following requirements:
1) They are not in your legion
2) Your cloak is sufficiently high

You're also making some assumptions here... I've scanned 82 planets in 60 levels. Never found anything better than oceanic, and only one of those.[/quote]

You might have bad luck. I've only found 22 planets and 2 are terras and 3 are oceanic. unfortunaterly I got most of them from hacking at low levels and they are claimed by people under level 20. I'm about to be on the leaderboard for hacking before I even get to rank 20. Makes me wonder how many people scanned the terra I settled even though I've cloaked it as well as I can. I want to be a twink at rank 20 but level fast from there, but I don't really have the patience to stockpile the tech, so I've been hacking incessantly. I'm leveling extra slow but these people essentially never log in. I think part of the reason it happens is because of the rule in the first place; people want to see how many artifacts and how much tech they can stockpile before they hit rank 20 and they do it by not playing the game. maybe there should be a research cap where you have to log in and spend your research or it will stop flowing (like with artifacts).

there is a research cap
hover your curser over the amount of research you have to spend and it will show your cap.
the cap gets larger as you level of course.

at the moment my research cap is 16,350. when it hits that, i accumulate no more research

you make me want to put that RP into cloaking instead.... i want to find one thats unscanned, but if its really that easy to hack a good planet... then i may try that. i have the ship strength to back it up i might just switch RP from scanners to cloaking... im srs.

Just hacked another (3rd) terra from a guy that looted an artifact from me. Its small though. hacking doesn't really help too much with research, but I have gotten a planet about 5% of the time. Don't know why they've been so nice. They aren't always settled but anything worthwhile is sure to be. You can only hack every 25 minutes so doing it a lot is a chore.

I have a thought for 'inactive' low level players. Right now there is daily upkeep. Don't check in to mine often enough and eventually your ship equipment begins to degrade. Eventually if you logged in you would have a completely derelict ship. Theoretically you could collect your resources, do some missions and rebuild.

What if we took it one step further? What if after your ship becomes derelict the upkeep cost was paid by sacrificing structures on planets? Eventually if all structures on a planet are consumed the planet is available for re-colonization without even attacking it. Finally when all structures on all planets and all equipment on the ship are consumed then a persons 'space colony' has collapsed and their account is auto-deleted. I imagine for most people who try the game this would give them a several week buffer in case they wanted to come back and it would be proportional to the amount of time they had put in originally...

...and if they disliked the game (or simply how their character was started) then it would be somewhat trivial to destroy their structures, sell their equipment, give away all of their cash and 'die out' over a week so they could re-start.

Just my proposed solution.
Sean

Issue: What structures go first? Demolishing structures are valued at zero. Would be unfair if 0 credits is converted to reduce upkeep.
Do keep enough credits to pay for a few days upkeep to prevent module damage.