i hate to say it, but some players have a very good point. it is likely pointless to dissuade the admins from account deletion.

it may be easiest to come up with ideas to keep the game more balanced. i have some ideas, myself, which i think stand a pretty good chance, but that's just [inexperienced] me, and i want to know what everyone else thinks before shooting my mouth off more

it may be an idea to repost some other ideas here just to help facilitate discussion [etc.], for instance [buzzards idea?] to make most of the df of a crashed fleet regenerated to help the victim, etc.

so this is how i understand the various standpoints to be:

zorg: wants more pvp [i.e. crashing or raiding of actives, etc.]. thinks new players will not like seeing lots of actives.

fleeters [you KNOW who i refer to ] - the big fleeters seem to want a reduction in other moons their targets can fs too.

certain other players: raiders, you're wasting your time. zorg will delete inactives regardless [it is in the rules, actually] so stop fighting it and propose alternatives.

the raiders/everyone else: no! stop deleting/v-moding inactives. i fall into this category myself, but i think i am correct in saying that this group primarily wants inactives to stay to be farms. if a viable alternative to fleet crashing [and soon to be non-existent raiding] were to be presented, am i right to guess this group would be happy? [or at least much more appeased]

the other everyone else: huh? raiding? crashing? what's this geek goin' on about?

if possible, i'd like to get a player or two from each group [besides the last one ] to reply with your stance on this issue, and i will update this page accordingly. nobody will get anywhere if we don't understand what anyone else wants.

by the same token, lets not have fleeters answering for raiders, raiders answering for zorg, and so on. otherwise the discussion will be hampered.

[once we're good on the stance of each group, THEN let's start discussing ideas, but not until then.]

primarily I'm a raider. I COULD get into fleeting if there were more fleets that I could plausibly go after, but at present I am most significantly a raider.

My Stance:
I like being able to spend time on zorg and earn resources quite closely based on that time I'm spending (roughly 20m+ per hour [standard]). It also allows me to socialise with my alliance (who are more active if they are also raiding) and be around should the smaller players need help.
If there are not enough resources to raid, I have no primary incentive to be online, and over the last few months have taken to longer fleetsaves (half-day -> full-day) as I lack the enthusiasm to check for raiding resources.

Abstract:
I want something to do that lets me earn resources safely over the time that I spend online, while also being able to chat with my fellow alliance members.

i have done the same athight with regards to fs :[

i think you're pretty representative of most raiders based on my interactions in different servers. i'll wait till a week after initial posting and then put idas out which hopefully players will reply to more than the first post :/

man, been sooooo busy, was hoping to put up an idea or two earlier but rl got in the way :/

was hoping others would have said something considering the activity on the thread about inactive deletion. since nobody has said anything, then I will assume I am largely correct unless told otherwise.

some idea off the top of my head:

1a. "computer controlled" farms with varying levels of "protection". so some farms have protection from players under a certain score, others have higher levels of protection and so on. the result being that the largest players only have a few farms to hit, and moving down the food chain, the weaker players have more and more farms with which to grow. At the higher levels it would be more worthwhile to crash fleets than raid. It also prevents larger players from monopolizing resources and strangling the growth of newer players (doing this to others on the same score range I think is fine though).

1b. related to this, if someone gets crashed, they get points deducted from their effective score (in determining farm protection) proportional (equal?) to the fleet lost. they then get more access to farms and can rebuild quicker. This means that a miner who had almost no fleet and gets crashed barely gets any advantage in rebuilding, while someone who was all fleet gets a much better chance to rebuild.

1c. also related to the farms could be "ghost fleeters". these would be npcs that randomly choose players and launch attacks on them, the fleets being related to the strength of the player attacked. then players can try to ninja, or attempt to evade the attack. these should have a much lower chance of destroying defenses as there is little you can do to prevent being attacked by these. there can also be fleets that periodically appear and move from one npc planet to another, giving fleeters something to try and attack. it might also make sense to have "ninjas" that pop up a little before a npc planet is attacked, but only during set times.

2. also, a largely unrelated note, I think the protection between players should be heavily extended. I myself am fine having to watch out for gozar, sprog, etc. in extreme, with a 200k account, and have no problem with similar situations should they arise in other servers (I have played all of them), but many other players, the softer core ones that make up the bulk of new players, won't be. it's not a matter of score, it's that they will view it as unfair, and to an extent I do agree. I propose to extend the 5x player protection for those in noob protection, all the way through the ranks. or something similar, but factoring in hidden fleets. so gozar would only be able to hit the largest players, and so on. this could potentially lead to strategies, such as a more advanced version of the 100k fleeter, or making huge walls to stockpile resources, protecting them from the players in the score range.