2001-09-24 - 11:04 p.m.

Planetarion: One in Ten

I haven't talked much about Planetarion recently (Thank God! Some of you are saying) and that's because round five hasn't started yet. It appears that the ticks (or turns) are not going to start for another week. The game is set up with all its galaxies in place, but nothing is moving.

The creators have changes the design of Planetarion a lot, and most of what they have done is a distinct improvement. However, there is a universal complaint: the font size of most of the text pages is too small. They unfairly discriminate against old people with failing eyesight!

These cosmetic improvements aside, this round looks very much like the beginning of the last round. Once again, people have been allowed to choose whether or not they want to start their own galaxies or be placed in a random galaxy. This ignores a fundamental fact of human nature: OF COURSE people are going to prefer owning their own galaxy - by a huge margin. Therefore, just like last time, the creators are going to have to compact the universe.

I would guestimate that the universe is less than 1/3 full currently. That is, your average galaxy has about 8 planets in it. However, there are very few with that many actual planets: most galaxies are either nearly full or almost empty. Well, that will change when the universe gets compacted on Friday.

However, while the situation is very similar to the beginning of the last round, there is one very important difference. Like I mentioned earlier Planetarion is now Pay-to-play, and this has caused a HUGE drop in the number of players.

To give you an idea, at the beginning of last round, there were over 720 clusters consisting of (potentially) 625 planets/players each. THIS round there are only about 90 clusters, meaning that the game lost 87% of its players when it went pay-to-play.

You know, my friend the Manager predicted that PA would lose 90% of its players, and dammit if he wasn't right, practically to the percentage point.

Of course, there is always the question of how many of last round's 173,000 Planetarion planets were "multis" that is, planets that were owned by someone who had other planets. There were even people who admitted to running entire galaxies (25 planets) by themselves. Not only were these guys cheaters, they were really dumb. Running that many planets sounds like a confusing pain in the butt. So, will P2P reduce the number of "multi" planets? Only time will tell.

Myself, I don't really understand why so many players dropped out. It's not like PA is a big expense: two accounts only cost $10. And there is actually a quantity discount: you can buy a whole galaxy for just $75 - that's only $3 a head for a game that is going to last a couple months.

This is so cheap, that I've actually paid for my whole galaxy myself. There were a couple of my new galaxy-mates that were panicking because they had no way to pay, so I'm footing the bill for everyone. They can pay me back if they feel like it, but $3 is a really trivial amount, so I don't care.

And of course there is the sleazy hope that I can buy their loyalty this way. Aren't I awful?

How's it going so far? Great! I've finally got all 25 votes for GC! Now let's see if I can KEEP them! Three dollars only goes so far.

However, I am a little worried how the creators are going to handle the fact that PA is so much smaller now. I'm sure they must be pretty disappointed.

And here's another disturbing little statistic. So far over 47,000 people have signed up for planets, but my rough estimate is that only about 18,000 people have actually paid for their planets. Are those other 29,000 people going to pony up? You don't actually get a planet on the board until it's paid for, so those other 29,000 planets are still in limbo.

Gee, no wonder the creators delayed the start of the round another week! I'm sure that they are watching their mailboxes anxiously, waiting for all those checks that are in the mail.