This game has two serious problems. 1. there are no new players, all star systems are extinct and empty with the exception of Tau Ceti and Sirius. 2. no new game content comes into play, and if it does, then at far too long intervals.
Keeping the remaining players and clans busy with PVP / conquests may be a good approach, but it is not enough and does not solve these core problems of the game. Your priorities are wrong.
The conquests, in which so much time, effort and energy is invested, do not interest me at all as a player without a clan. On the contrary, there are now so few players and clans on the Korell server alone that it's really difficult to find somewhere to play, especially when other players on Korell think they have to make promises or invitations to join clans and then you yourself are rejected, or there are clans that insist on voice chat on Korell, or there are some clans with completely absurd demands.
And even if it were possible for me to take part in conquests, I wouldn't do it, because I think the way you deal with other players when they have to go afk on the surface is pretty questionable, and I don't really find the whole feature of conquests attractive for me as a player.
So before any players are penalized here for little things like afk, maybe they should work on other core problems of the game first, which should have a higher priority, because I honestly don't know how I should continue in this game at all with this background.
I'm level 91 and stuck on Venar. Before I can continue, I have to get more Ring 5 blueprints from Sirius thanks to a game update, because they think I'm not allowed to unlock the blueprints I made in Tau Ceti, so this star system is unplayable for me. I can't even buy a new Tau Ceti spaceship there... And even then, the storyline there might not be playable solo.
I could create my own clan for the few missing Sirius components, but surprise: there are no new players left to join. And surprise: The enemies that have the required blueprints can't be destroyed solo in Sirius, even though I was able to get my Venar blueprints. How can it be that Sirius Ring 5 units are impossible to solo, but Venar units are? I could look for an existing clan, but surprise: there are very few clans left, some with high requirements.
How are you supposed to progress in this game if you're slowed down like that? With this background, I can actually and strictly speaking look for another game, because how should things continue for me? I hope they reconsider the situation this game has put itself in.
In the past, when there were still enough players and a higher number of clans, or even when I had my own clan, I didn't have these problems. Not even at times when you could still play the storyline without clan dependency. In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes was to increase the difficulty of the storyline so drastically. The loss of players only came about due to long development breaks / inactivity of the game.
You can now rest on the existing players that are still left, or perhaps you can now ensure that the number of players for this game increases again.
Suggestions, potential solutions:
- Make game more popular through advertising, and by publishing on different platforms. (Facebook, Steam, GoG). More players = more clans.
- Reduce time gaps to new game content, even if Dino Storm has to suffer. It sounds harsh, but why release 3 games at all if you have a team that is far too small for it, as I have often read here in the forum? Pirate Galaxy was there first, not Dino Storm.
- Login Gifts, Activity Gifts: Pour out Cryonite, Gravitons, Energy, and small amounts of Gold for players who log into the game daily, while offering smaller easier activity tasks.
- More variety in the game: Introduces special time-limited quests, especially for the lower star systems. Reward and difficulty of the quests depend on pilot level. Can something like this be achieved?
- New events. Come up with new events and don't just repeat existing events. This has been going on for years, and please change the rewards you can earn. The rewards have remained the same for years. Please change more often.
- Scrambled blueprints: Remove this barrier from the game, or adjust the difficulty so that the items required for Tau Ceti can be obtained solo in Sirius. Sirius should not be a star system designed primarily for clans. There aren't even enough players or enough clans to justify that anymore. Clans should be an optional way to form larger groups of players, to network, to keep busy. But now, because of Sirius and Tau Ceti, your game progress is dependent on clans... Clan bound. That shouldn't be the case.
Please focus on the core problems of this game and not on side issues. The consequence is, and will be, that I will ultimately have to give up the game if the situation doesn't improve.
