Really good points Ace

Zorg says it is what the majority wants but not any in my alliances so I wonder who this majority are...? The PB opinion on this and the other thread is almost unanimously against. The only benefit to part of the PB - as Sprog says - is to reduce the easy FS options and therefore make fleeting easier. However that issue would be tackled by a more gradual system of deletions, that would force people to look for other options rather than just always using the same 9.9k inactive moons forever.

just another thought that came to mind,
many things are scaled to the universe speed, why not inactive deletions? (yes i'm aware that this is primarily a benefit for standard but )

Don't pretend that deleting inactives is not good for the newcomers. Newcomers always have plentiful inactives to plunder as most of the newcomers become that after all.

This is not the problem, this is helping the game. Empty space looks better than a sea of blues/inactives after all.

Zorg wrote:Don't pretend that deleting inactives is not good for the newcomers. Newcomers always have plentiful inactives to plunder as most of the newcomers become that after all.

Deleting accounts is not good for newcomers. You are pretending otherwise. If you get rid of 0 point accounts, that doesn't effect things, but let's look at it like this: You are a new player and just got some cargoes. Do you want to raid the inactive with no defense and level 30 mines? Yes, because that account with generate resources quickly. Then the new player can raid it and grow. Now let's pretend that all the inactives have 0 points and their mines suck because the admins deleted all the good inactives. You'll get bored and be on the game less with no raiding or growth.

Zorg wrote: Empty space looks better than a sea of blues/inactives

So that is what this is all about. Aesthetics. Removing the inactive farms makes no sense for the current players otherwise. This is about the impression that clueless new players will have before getting bored and quitting? Give them a tutorial already. Do something to get the chat active (rewards maybe?). New players go into chat, see the chat is dead and realize the game is not very active. If they see an active chat, they can learn from other players and stay around. Make the deletions tiered then so that the larger point accounts last a long time before deletion while the new ones are removed quickly without activity.

Seriously, there are a lot of common sense options out there. Many of them are easy to do, but not being done. Do an option that does not alienate the vast majority of players or else you'll only be left with a larger sea of inactives and vmodes

oh you mean the plenty of 0 point accounts you're dropping to negate the accounts you've deleted?

mine production is too slow, especially in the beginning. at least before you had a decent chance of finding a good farm somewhere nearby. You can't even use expeditions since they are worthless as is. so if you are starting out or trying to rebuild you are just kind of screwed. you won't have much or any fleet to attack hardly anyone, it's not like every few days a player with good mines decides to quit without going vmode.

How about marking players over 30 days inactive as (f) for farm? You could also use this tag for the accounts you drop so it does not make probing a pain in the but

As nice as it is for us to put our opinions forward, ze will not listen to us. They have made up their minds and will barge onwards regardless of what we say. Sure, fair enough, it's their game. HOWEVER, I for one have brought rubies to line their pockets and so they could at least give us rubie buyers some thought. If they continue on this course I see no further reason to buy them. We are the ones who fund the game Zorg, if it isn't worth buying rubies cause the gameplays 2 boring, you'll starve and us as players will lose a game that we all enjoy and like.
Although who knows? maybe the mass reform will change things... if you can keep things interesting ill happily send you guys some cash!
Cheers (we don't hate you zorg, we just want a fun game)

IKICKAYOUWASSNOW wrote:So that is what this is all about. Aesthetics.

No. I was responding to your remark:

IKICKAYOUWASSNOW wrote:You'll only be left with a larger sea of inactives and vmodes

If you want to know what is all about, here are the latest 3 topics on the issue (starting from my 1st reply)

viewtopic.php?p=119754#p119754 (this topic)

viewtopic.php?p=119012#p119012

viewtopic.php?p=119011#p119011

---=-=----==-----===-----

Nautilus, its all about creating an active game. So far, it is working out. Things are going better every month while it used to go worse. Again, I am not saying that this is due to the inactives deletion. It is the general recipe. We are now applying the same receipe to Speed and we expect it to improve fast. We are actively trying to improve the activity of the old universes. It is not paying as much as a new universe would but at least we do not let down our active playerbase.

medal, these plenty of 0 point accounts are not dropped. These are real persons. Sadly, browser games do not appeal that much to the mass as they used to do. This is not a ZE-experience. This is the general situation. In the old times, you could post a link on a forum and you would get 2000 signups. Out of the 2000 signups, you would get about 500 active players. Now, to fetch 2000 registrations, you need professional approach with advertisement. And from the 2000 players about 200 will stay. That's the metrics, the universal browser game metrics. Not ZE metrics, our metrics are better.


I will repeat some fundamental reasons. I know the feeling of losing a good farm nearby... and I know that is can be devastating. So I want to reassure you that this is for the best of both you and the game:
1)Farming an inactive player is not exciting (unless some other player decides to punish you for farming his farm).
2)This leads to general interest drop. Which results in reduced activity.
3)Next step is game retirement which eads to fewer players.
4)If too many people leave, we do not manage to renew them on time and the game active players are reduced.
5)This worsens the retirement rate.


In the contrary, fewer inactives and fewer good farms can lead to many quite interesting events:
1)More surprises for those raiding the inactives (more people are probable to decide to punish you).
2)More excitement
3)More people actively seeking food on active players
4)This creates conflict which boost interest.
5)Boosted interest keeps players active and entertained.
6)This improves player retention and fewer people retire.

It is worthwhile to mention that we have not yet reached our objective of 45 days old deletion. While this is possible, this has not happened yet. We have mostly deleted accounts that were inactive for over a year! I don't think there are any excuses for saving such accounts. Slowly we will move to 6 months and then to 3 months till we are able to meet the 45 days objective.

The key in achieving this is to always keep a positive activity rise. We are still manually skipping some deletion cycles. Generaly though,there is 1 per week. We are doing this because we do care for the game and the playerbase and we want to be certain that we are making the right moves every time.

Finally,here is a nice link back to about a 1year old post of mine that worths the time reading it: viewtopic.php?p=111705#p111705

I can't disagree with what zorg is suggesting.
However I have had a lot of fun competing with my fellow alliance members to find the 'best' inactives to yield the highest profit. unfortunately this is a different type of game, and only supports a small playerbase, however it would be nice for points like this to be acknowledged.

while Zorg will be a great game for years to come, the new actives will find it increasingly harder to catch up as existing players push forward, unless they have sufficient fellow players around them to take resources from.



are there any screenshots of what we typically see and do when we log into zorg? after a brief look on the home page, the tour is somewhat misleading, not that i can imagine a large proportion of potential signups using it.
New players that are leaving would have to be polled but i suspect that after registration, they don't like what they see and quit. some do take a look around and build for a while as evidenced by new players with some points, but often don't continue.

some of the things that should probably be screenshotted (faked or not):
overview page
empire page
fleet page (with some fleet present)
galaxy page (semi populated)

screenshots that (i think) might draw attention and interest:
combat reports of large battle(s) (actually they have no clue of the scale, so escalate up to including a RIP and a RIP takedown by lg's)
the overview page with incoming AND outgoing attacks.
galaxy page displaying a debris field (from a combat report perhaps?)


I'm sure this list is incomplete, but the point being, show people what they are getting into and then show them the excitement that can pursue.


one other thing is what is the current 'welcome to zorg' default message (if there is one), perhaps it needs tweaking?

Good on you Zorg, some good points you made there. I like what your saying about having only a few farms to fight over. However, if you follow the 45 then delete plan for mass we will end up with very few (if any farms ) and none will be worth raiding. Why not bring the vmode s out of vmode for a few days before you delete them? Now that would be some action!

Let me tell you a story.

When I first started playing ZE I loved the mystery of the game, the fact that there were so many inactive targets around, lots with strong defenses that I couldn't tackle, there were alliances out there with mind boggling big numbers too. I looked at this challenge with a big grin on my face and raided, then started messaging my neighbors and seeing if any of them wanted to band together to build the biggest alliance ever known to surmount these challenges.

It took a year and dozens if not a hundred different people working together but we did it. We sieged all the inactive defenses, took their resources for our own, fought over the raider leaderboards and were determined to be #1 every week in every category we could win in. It was a blast.

Fast forward to today, I am no longer as interested in raiding. I still have fun playing but the pace is now casual instead of frantic.. Why? Well when I probe around in the day, the inactives that I probe to hit have about 1/4th the resources they used to. I no longer feel excited when I see 400k metal sitting around on a planet when I used to see 2 million. It almost does not feel worth launching my fleets, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Heck this morning I wrote this instead of launching my fleet.

Think about that, also I spent about $200 on rubies last year, if you keep track of that. I'll talk more about this later, cya all.