I think this is a bad move by ZE at this time, under the circumstances of there isn't a big playerbase.

1. I have noted and seen many players return for months and months, if you would have deleted them, you lose those players from playerbase as most wouldnt want to restart new account.

2. Bad for Business in the long run as a company

3. It will become my Goal to kill more players off if it doesnt stop making ZE lose more playerbases

4. ZE lacks future vision to thrive, Suicide....Pure Suicide the moves Admins have made. I see simple fixes that could be made to revive ZE, add simple fixes to current servers, and Deploy 1 new server with proper advertising, could be bigger than O G A M E........Whay ban the name O G a m e, this game was born from the idea of O g a m e, make it better than o g a me

5. Only simple fixes done to existing servers, with dramatic changes to a new server forever changing and moving this game genre in a better direction

many copies and clones out there, I have had access to ZE clones, seen game inside and out from its basics with a admin panel game testing for companies. Alot of copycats out there who all lack the vision to success, unable to create servers full of thousands.

I like ZE of all games due to its pages, navigation is simpler and more basic. all clones I have played and beta tested only differences I note are looks of the pages etc, game strategy and results are all the same, thats what needs fixed, not just pretty pages ( a copy thats just painted over)

Lets talk

This has been discussed before.

There are points on both sides, the only thing i KNOW us players can do is be active on the forums and contribute our thoughts.

Indeed, athight is correct, this has been discussed already too many times.

This is the most recent discussion:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11262
where points are mentioned.

Let's now see some metrics since that discussion, 1.5 months back. Let's see for X-TREME, which is our oldest universe.

X-TREME last 1.5 month metrics
So, since about October 17, about 1500 to 1750 accounts have been deleted.

In the same time about the same new players have opened a new account in X-TREME (About 1250 new accounts in October and 1000 new in November).

Activity in X-TREME has risen. I cannot share exact data but here is a sample using actual metrics:
September activity: 100%
October activity: 114%, an increase of 14%
November activity: 123%, an increase of 23% since September and 9% since October.

Active core player numbers were increased. We do not want to share this data though.

So eventually, X-TREME, despite the removal of about 1750 user accounts, has more players who are also more active.

Is this only because of deleted accounts? No. Can we safely tell if it would be better in terms of activity if there were the extra accounts? No. Is however the result better in whatever actions we did last 2 months, including the deletions? Yes.

This is what matters in the end. How active the game universe will be, is our responsibility. We are aware of any activity problem at least 1 year ahead. We know when the problem will be obvious to the playerbase about 6 months ago. We can change the activity tide in three days if we want. What we want however is what the majority wants. And the majority wants a competitive game.


Our plan will continue and we want to slowly reach the initial point which is inactive accounts for more than 45 days will be deleted. For accounts that have rubies, these will enter a forced v-mode after 45 days of inactivity so they stop acting as farms.

If you want to make profit with your fleet, then you will have to make it against active players and not against farms. If this is good or bad for the game, allow me to say that you are not in a good decision to say so.

You might feel lonely that a ton of inactive players have disappeared from your portion of the map but in some other place, some other players feel uneasy with all these new intruders. It's a cycle and you have to adapt with it to prevail.

In the end, it is a choice we make for our game. We prefer active accounts over inactives. This is a multiplayer game.

While we are at it, here are the ranks of current universes:

Activity
1.Xtreme
2.Speed
3.Standard
4.Massacre

Active Players
1.Xtreme
2.Standard
3.Speed
4.Massacre

The reason speed has more activity although less players than Standard is because of game speed and the player it attracts.

The reason Massacre ranks last, is because of the no-deletion policy. That's what we say. We will try to fix that but it is going to be hard.

If you are contemplating which universe to play, choose not with the chart above but with these characteristics in mind:

X-TREME - The ultra competition due to the large number of planets allowed and the huge map.
Standard - When time is an issue, select this universe.
Speed - When you want things to run faster and have time in your hands.
Massacre - It is a smaller x-treme,fewer planets allowed and smaller map but better (and deadlier) combat simulator.

zorg i hope as u deleting inactives u create Storage Dens in all servers faster
miners will be in real problem cuz they will get farms by what ur doing now

zero1 wrote:zorg i hope as u deleting inactives u create Storage Dens in all servers faster
miners will be in real problem cuz they will get farms by what ur doing now

Storage Dens are not really needed though. There are ways to keep your account unprofitable even for big guns. Surely, Storage Dens will help newbs and will allow a new style of play but I cannot know if they will be implemented on all universes, the playerbase will tell.

Zorg wrote: In the same time about the same new players have opened a new account in X-TREME (About 1250 new accounts in October and 1000 new in November).

I would bet anything that >1500 of those accounts are already inactive. With a start to this game that is more boring than a soap opera, no wonder. Thought tutorials were approved a while ago?:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6711

If you can keep the plentiful amount of new players from getting bored, you'd be set. That's a much larger problem than raiders raiding. So let's put ourselves in the shoes of a new player. This one is quite easy for me since I restarted a few weeks ago:

So the start of the game is slow. Hell, I could go play an fps and be immersed immediately. Okay so the chat here is dead too, not noob friendly, if I was just starting now for the first time, I would have just left. Before there was an active playerbase that showed new players how to play.

Okay, let's assume a new player sticks though that. So they want to grow and they start raiding. New players of course raid inactives as they are the easy farms to grow from. Hey guys, I have a good idea to increase activity, let's get rid of all the inactives . I hope you can see the problem with this logic.

Okay, so now let's pretend the inactives are gone (at least for the most part, as 45 day deletions/vmodes will remove the good farms). So you are a new player and need to make your profits from something. You are in noob protection so you can't raid large players. There are few inactives. Looks like you get to watch your mines produce. Very fun game idea .

As well, new players want to catch the big dogs in any game they play. And let's face it, new players in servers have no chance to catch the top players without large pools of inactives. Taking two players that joined late and caught up to the top (from when I know) - Dex (probe raiding inactives) and Thorr (constant raiding inactives and RIP-raiding inactives when he'd be offline). Both those players raided inactives for the vast majority of their profits. I'm sure others have caught up since, probably by doing the same. Lowering the chance of new players catching large players will be demoralizing to them and make them leave.

Zorg wrote:How active the game universe will be, is our responsibility. We are aware of any activity problem at least 1 year ahead. We know when the problem will be obvious to the playerbase about 6 months ago. We can change the activity tide in three days if we want. What we want however is what the majority wants. And the majority wants a competitive game.

Has there been a poll? I'd challenge you to open a poll. If most players that vote want inactives gone, then whether it is right or wrong, you have given your customers what they wanted, but I can tell you that the majority won't agree with you. Do the poll. You want what the majority want right? Let's see what they want.

I'm not one to come and speak about these kinds of things, but you can't really believe that having inactive players is the cause of player base down fall, do you? The players that join and end up staying, only do so because they can get a nice boost off the inactive players, without the problems of big fleet to start. There's 4 main types of players, Turtles, fleeter, raider and hybrid.

A turtle isn't getting punished by removing anything from defense are they?
A fleeter isn't being punished by removing any type of ship or aspect they use, are they?

The ones that are suffering are those that are raiders or "hybrids". When you make one class suffer, you will inevitably ruin that class of player, to the point of extinction. Watching the player base for almost 5 years now, I have realized that the biggest part of the playerbase is raiders.

I can see why you think all the inactives are the cause, because lets face it, a new player coming in and seeing all the inactive players, thinks the game is dead. There are ways to keep those players from becoming inactive instead of taking away any chance they have to ever catch up.

One thing I think you could do to help, is hide the points in the rankings page, It's discouraging for a new player to come to a game and see huge points, such as 53 million for top player in speed and 125 million for top player in Xtreme. I now that I would never attempt to play a game that has such a huge gap from a new player all the way up to the top player. It keeps moral low, and makes people think "why bother."

Last thing I'll say is this, you're taking good farming inactives away, and essentially replacing them with 0 point inactives, it's not going to help anyone out. Maybe advertise better, and listen to the player base, because 90% are pretty smart about this kind of stuff, and willing to help out.

/EndRant.

we will see, for every action is a reaction and the reaction to actions so far has led to a low playerbase. Skew the numbers all you want zorg, but we see the end result.

Storage dens a copycat implementation, other games have it, already been done, time to stop copying and create new, I was thinking a introduction of a new weapon system, which would be easy to implement as already in game, just needs some tweaks. and no need to implement a counter as the counter already exists. A real game changer no game has done and would take the game into a fresh and new direction setting ze apart totally. Ill be happy to bring it up once I see realistic thought to a better game, think more starwars, not star trek

i agree with the idea to hide points of the high players, perhaps the reverse could also be possible to hide tiny players from those massive players? its always possible to ask to find out.
perhaps players that appear (n) or (s) should have points hidden? (probably too small of a window but its a starting point )

also what i'm hearing behind this is 'new players need inactive farms' and 'raiding inactives is sucking the competitiveness out of the game' so to stop the large players attacking inactives perhaps a new state is needed (f) [farm] which says 'this account will be deleted sooner or later' and disallow attacks on accounts of this state if it is seen as (n).
new players have resources in their reach while larger players will have less. its not much but it would allow new players to have farms until they grow too large to be considered a new player.