2001-07-22 - 11:59 p.m.

Planetarion: Beta Testing Madness

This round of the online game Planetarion is coming to an end. That means that the creators are already testing the next round, and guess who is helping them? That's right, your friend Mr. Hamster.

The guys who created Planetarion are forever tweaking their ships statistics and their asteroid capture formulas. They are seeking the Holy Grail called "balance." In short, they are trying to create a game that will be fun for new and experienced players alike.

So far - no luck!

In previous rounds I've heard that the creators were running beta tests, and I thought it might be something interesting to do. The creators gave galaxies to the heads of the biggest alliances and told them to fill them with 25 of their most active and dedicated players. I volunteered for a spot in one of the Fury galaxies, and was very surprised when I was picked. I figure it’s a good way to get a sneak preview what the next round is going to be like.

Besides the fact that some of the rules are different in the beta, there are two major differences from "REAL" Planetarion.

First, there is the size. There are over 160,000 people playing in the current round of Planetarion - the beta only has around 1,600. That means that instead of 7,800 galaxies, there are only about 75. This means that (in theory!) the server should never get overloaded.

Second, and most importantly, the game is much speedier. In real PA, ticks usually occur once every hour. A tick is like a turn in a board game - all the fleets are advanced forward one step, and everyone gets resources to spend.

In the beta ticks started at one every two minutes, but when the server couldn't handle that, it was scaled back to one every five minutes. That means that a usual Planetarion "day" (24 ticks) now happens in two hours. Cool!

This faster pace makes the game much more exciting. You can launch an attack and have your ships back again in less than two hours. Of course the downside of that is that you can go out to lunch for a half an hour, come back and find enemy ships landing on your planet. Them's the breaks!

This means that a beta planet is much more high-maintenance than a usual PA planet. We'll have to see how this little experiment turns out.