An interesting observation and I'd be tempted to say that the slow ranking and/or reset PVP build is actually what is causing the game to die. Recruitment in sister legions that accept lower ranks is getting harder and harder, more and more legions seem to be merging to maintain their population, and I've noticed a trend towards even more glass 7 bases recently. Those observations make me believe the player base at the low end is withering. Based on discussions I see in some of our inter-legion FB chats, I think part of that is due to various "PVP abuses" (particularly the slow ranking or reset PVPer who multi-raids or multi-hacks for leaderboard actions as this seems to turn off most of the victims of those actions). One thing that might help with this is to simply change the way leaderboard raids and hacks are counted. Say, making only actions that actually earn a badge count for a raid or hack, instead of just something that returns some minerals, artis, or research. That would reduce the motivation for raiding or hacking the same ship within a 12 hour period and, even worse, the ships that pluck clean alerted ships way below their badge range just for stats. You could still allow the ability so people could take "revenge" for certain things if they wanted to, but there would be little motivation for them to occur without provocation if they didn't count towards leaderboard stats. I don't know if it's already too late to stop this trend or not, but it's worth a try to get new blood in the game.

One related thing is that it would be good if lower ranked dead legions would be cleaned up more rapidly. Particularly below level 5 as there seem to be waaay too many dead level 4 and 5 legions/bases in the game that just make you expend more and more reds during base scans....

New players want big ships with shinny moduals, bottom line most new players will think DECKS are the way to go. They then discover afew say two months that decks suck and they can't remove them. they learn that VERY few moduals are worth having because TO's are better, no upkeep, no damage cap, unlimited ect A new player say a month old can't compleat with ships that take 100+ energy to destroy and they DO exist at the pre 100 level, Telling a new player "if you do these things in 9 months you will be awesome" only appeals to a VERY small select group of people, Facebook games are about instant gratification, doing cool stuff, NOT delayed gratification. Bottom line damage cap IS killing the game, SSB IS killing the game, the numbers do not lie, make the game more "look at my cool ship and all its shinny guns instead of Look at how many TO's I have, and you will start to get new players back in to the game, make ship mods the focus you WANT more of them THEY are the path to a great ship, not how many years can you grind ap, Make damage cap based on number of days played, that would be the ulitmate way of balancing it, and yes you DO count a resets time.

Re-dress supposed SSB imbalances all you like, it still won't change the fact that the game gets squat by way of advertising.

Increased advertising = more players in

I'm not entirely sure about that. Since the addition of trainees, we've gotten to see more of the newbies. The trouble is, most don't stay very long at all. We've had about 31 trainees, but only 1 graduate. That's a pretty low retention rate.

Not really, the amount of legion out there is getting lower and lower, before there were a lot of new player joining a ton of legions, nows there a few new players joining a small amount of legions.
I think the biggest increase of new player was when dan, had those deal on other games or those survey websites. where you earn something by getting to a certain rank ( rank 20-30 ), most ppl didnt auto rank to that rank and they realized this game was actually pretty good and stayed. Thats how i got into this game, from my old dying game. I think, if dan has the money and care, he should do that again/ more.

On the topic at hand, most likely already been said . I dont think the Dam cap should be ''re-balanced'' and lets be honest you can whine/argue/discuss/wish/pray all you like but it never will be , Ppl put the effort in and time to build a SSB, for the the few benefits and one being a low dam cap. The SSB style has a lot more drawbacks than gains IMO, it aint all rainbows and pizzas, most of them still get disabled by other SSB's and disabled in general , and most of them are giving up a ton of time, money, effort , will and fun for their SSB. Which most Non SSB cant /couldnt be asked to do. I personally dont like The SSB style, too much restriction , and most if not all aim to be king of the newbs rather than a decent high ranked ship, but i respect the effort most put into it.I dont think someone who put all that effort for the low Dam cap ( thats is the only reason most ppl chose a SSB ), should be punished because a select few people are annoyed that they can't get red badges as easily , or what ever reason they have .

Honestly, I can't say this enough. This is NOT ABOUT SSBs. It's about various flaws in the damage cap formula -- the biggest being the deck based cap applied in both forward and reverse attacks. No matter your build, you will pretty much pick a size and stay there. Then your hull + shields + defense will continue to grow forever. Even ships with very high attack see an ever increasing amount of energy and clicks spent on PVP which is a severe PVP demotivator. Frankly, the ships with very high AP pulls are harder to kill than the SSBs. I think I've killed every SSB I've ever seen at one time or another, but I can guarantee you there are some large ships that I don't touch without provocation. So PLEASE, can we talk about the actual damage cap formula instead of constantly trying to redirect this thread into a radical defense of an SSB life choice and attempt to obfuscate the issue with this constant SSB smoke and mirrors redirection? I PVP quite a bit and am over rank 1600 so I think I have some insight into the way this is going. Most of the strong PVP SSBs I see are sub-rank 1200 and can still attack ships down in the 600-700 range (heck, they might still see ships without geminis from time to time!), so life still looks good to them. But, one day, they'll creep up here and their trigger finger will start annoying them.....LOL

Score! I remember my early days in a smaller legion family. All the advice I used to get back then was "guns and hull" and it was actually FUN. Everyone shared their accomplishments as they rushed to get a shiny new gun or piece of plating. People PVPed more and folks had things like PVP contests (when's the last time you heard of one of them in a top legion?). Once your ship "grew up" and you got a generous AP pull, your AP eventually overwhelms all your modules so you start telling newbies to avoid that stuff and the game becomes just boring for them (not to mention looking ridiculous as unarmed/undefended rocks slowly accumulate artis and become more powerful). Even as a higher ranked player pulling in a decent AP pull, the game starts to wear on you as new modules only become available a few times a year and all you're doing is stacking up androids, brackets and cells in every available ship nook and cranny of your fixed size ship. (And, as a frequent forum reader, I can't count the times I've seen people ask for some form of click reduction -- in both arti use and in combat.) Finally, when new modules are introduced, many are trivial things...say 80 attack, 100 shields, or something similar that you can gain from just a few hours of AP pulls so they're not even attractive anymore. It's like they're all designed with a rank 100-200 in mind -- except that most seem to come with steep upkeep gains now (What's the deal with that? Just further de-motivation for ship-building?) The over simplistic "artis + time = good ship" formula for success combined with the damage cap ridiculousness pretty much destroys the whole fun of building a space ship if introduced to most newbies. Very few newbies have the patience for that path.

I agree Purf. The downstream effect is pretty much that way. People who have played 3+ years made choices and enjoyed a much different culture of play. The shift is now moving into an inverse curve...with lots of very strong ships ..many very large as well-at one end...and a bunch of slow rankings mini hulks on the other end. You speak the words in my mind on the modules as well....the whole idea of a cool space adventure and mega ship is having all the bells amd whistles. OVer time for everyone, not ssb, not lsb, but everyone...they just aren't worth it.

I also picked an aribtrary deck limit and stopped there. I have scrapped over a dozen hull modules, half a dozen weapons, and not sure how many energy items as other stuff ccame out. Mind you most of it isn't worth using versus what I already pull/grow daily. But some are better than the older, so i bolt them on ole bessie. Now if i didn't have the decks yet, i would look and go meh. Bonny did a great analysis long ago on the upkeep and benefit of theta's versus quasi's. Very eye opening. Its super expensive to outfit the highest level of any branch of items, and for a minimal additional effect. I would be shocked if more than 5% of players (and this is a generous estimate) have the max cloak items on their ship. I'd venture a majority of people don't have 5 researched hulls or all the researched energy modules. Probably a sizable minority, and growing over time, don't have all 8 researchable weapons installed.

Bigger items should cost a ton more, but should curve better in output as well. We get to sneak in some % items here and there...those are cool.. 2% added to 300k-500k-700k becomes a nice bonus..especially when it multiplies with other bonuses. Hull is a great example. Here you are also dead on. We ALL grow daily. My modest 170k ap is still enough to add hundred of hull and shields daily as well as the same for attack and defense.

It's kind of a game based inflation economy. If we all grow in a somewhat similar way..or even within a wide scope of similar values....with cap and decks remaining constant...it means more energy/time/ effort to kill even a modest ship. Purists may argue there's holistic value in hard work to gain a reward. I wouldn't dispute that....but there's had and there;s ridiculous. There are a lot of ships out there tougher than most bases people hit. You CAN debuff the people, but not their hull. And even at a hits@cap progression this will only grow worse.

Some flicker of change is needed, be it bypassing of defense to score big crits...mega bombs which have huge effects, mod to existing formula itself...seems like there is meat on the bone.

not so sure about that, Lots of people have relays (energy reserch)

You got it. And, it's not like we're actually making a "new" argument either. Over 2 years ago, Wolfy predicted this. It's just taken a long time with massive arti pulls for us to start to see it as a real possibility. The quote below comes from an April, 2013 post:



I'm not sure "total invulnerability" is possible for offline ships since you can obliterate their shields and keep them down with artis so you just whack at their hull, but online invulnerability is already here to some extent. Single online ships with good Internet connections have claimed to have defended Exotica from massive arti-included attacks by multiple legions and easily survived. And "practical invulnerability" is certainly possible (meaning that a ship could have enough hull that you would give up on them before disabling them assuming they were tread-milling you).

Which leads to another interesting question: If you're normally a PVPer from the non-arti use school, how would you ever know if your opponent's shield regen rate exceeded your damage rate? You could plow on for a long time and give up assuming they're tread-milling you when they might just have an enormous shield (and associated shield regen rate). It's not like you can see your opponent's shield and hull levels like you can in a base battle. And, there are already existing ships out there that have scary looking attack and defense numbers (that also imply scary hull and shields since this ALL comes from massive AP pulls). So, for all I know, there might be some ships that are either close to it or have already achieved shield regen rates in excess of the damage I could do (I'll probably never know since I wouldn't bother to attack anyone whose probed stats make me think their hull and shields are ridiculous as well).

Yea, i suspect most people follow that rule of thumb. If probe indicates a long hard battle then we move along. Grudges, a wild hair, revenge, sense of pride and accomplishment may drive some kills of stronger ships, but on a much reduced scale for sure. I'm a halc defender even though i almost never use one, but the fact so many people halc all the time speaks in part to the greater scope of battle dynamics. I have a decent e bar close to 20-1 ratio so i can auto on pvp. Many people cannot and to know they have to spend thousands of e to MAYBE get two badges, then probably get spanked for 2 days by a variety of people far stronger than them is a demotivator.

Of the best times i've had on here, many were basing and chatting at same time. Planning and taking exotica or other planets, with active defense or not. Big team npc hunts with tons of alerts and speedy clicking to get on some of them. PVP was always a side item and there to break up boredom and change of pace. Once I started doing it a lot (rank 1100 or so) I never really probed people I just went by the do more than i receive philosophy and clicked till the ship dropped two of the same trap,,, repaired shields from being into hull,, or they died. But there were lots of people even then (2 years ago) that it took 2-5 minutes of good clicking to kill. While i've grown leaps since then, so have most of the other people. The pure time investiture is moving the dial towards less attacking of ships and more npc for some and stale growth for others.

I won't go down the game is circling the drain invocation, but i will say there is a cascading effect on pvp based on unlimited growth and cap based dynamics. The butterfly effect of that on the holisitic game situation is hard ot judge...but the eye test says things are slanting negatively.

There is a lot of good input on here from all angles, I think Dan is pretty brilliant and I hope he incorporates more of the germaine ideas into his roadmap forthe game.