My Thoughts

[LotuS]

Space Merchant Realms has changed drastically since I started playing it. Alot of things have changed for the good, and some apparently not for the good. I’ve done alot of thinking about why when the game was in the earlier beta stages, continuously plagued with bugs, with lack of finished manual, advanced multi detection, or even organized official rules, could keep so many people addicted through the crap that went down. I looked through some of my own screenshots, and found pictures of 20 people from 1 alliance on CPL, 50-60-or more on CPL total. Now I look at the cpl and see 6 people. What has changed? Where did the fun game go? Do you know? This game flourished because the majority of the players cared about the game and not about what happened on the web board, or who becomes admin. It was less serious because the game was malleable. You were in control more, way more than we are now. You could without much effort, raid a level 1 port for 2 days in your carapace, and go from 180 alignment to -100 and get a death cruiser the following day.


You could get 15 of your friends together and actually shoot at a planet or port or someone with all 16 of you, with no attacker cap. You weren’t guaranteed by code, that at least 1 of your guys in a level 70 op would die every shot, because that’s what happens when you force attacker caps and your max damage is capped. It is another example of CODE, taking away power, from you the player, which causes immense amounts of frustration on a subconscious level. Another example is taking away live stats, you used to be able to stare at CPL screen and get your head close to the screen, and be pressing f5 continuously, and if your every could catch movement, you could track a traders experience and through mathematical calculations, and a little help from your manually programmed SMC program, you could find the route and ship of someone and find the route through smc. But then they removed live CPL and that was the end of that. You could now only find someone in the game through scout drones. This inadvertently reduced player interaction on a daily basis. There is nothing more boring than playing smr and not ever seeing another player.

SMR over the years gradually removed most of the free will and diversity of game play and strategies from its own game. There used to be bugs to exploit and server crashes on a weekly basis, and it didn’t matter too much because there were always more to find and exploit. But once it got to the point where the code became so convoluted with little rules about this or that, there was no more "say" in the matter, you could hunt or, trade from fed, or you could be part of a alliance with a galaxy. That was it, there was no more in-between.

Everything from slaving your alliance mates, to making long trade routes and trading 1 good at a time, to raiding level 1 ports with 5 people all firing at once, to exploiting port raid money, to multis, interest in bank accounts and on bounties, to multiple color names and being able to kick people off planets, smr sucked the control of your character right out of your hand, and forced you into a preconceived 'way of things' that was blindly perpetuated by me, my friends, you, your alliance mates and leaders. It was how we adapted to the changed being made at the time, and we did the best we could as far as we could tell. But what we didnt realize is that we werent even in control anymore, because if we were, this wouldent of ended up this way. SMR became impossible for new players to play because of the limitations placed on us, which forced us (everyone) to create a live game atmosphere which was toxic to new people and new ideas. The game adapted with the shrinking player base, and the way we played to get by in that type of game only hurt it in the long run. It took a while, but pretty much everyone has quit by now because of it.

SMR Needs to go back to basics of what make a game attractive to people, especially new people. All the options of SMR 1.5 are interesting, and cool, and new, but they are doing nothing to fix the game or attract new players because at the core of the current code there are to many basic limitations on players. Our Official rules are pages long. Our manual tells newbies that Alskant is a good race for beginners. Have you ever tried a more boring, limited, pathetic race other than alskant? I haven’t.

Control is what people are addicted to. When you can see the same game anyone can, and read or use information available to everyone better than others if you can see it fast enough, or write it down fast enough, or search it fast enough and get ahead, that’s control. People will always say its unfair, unfair to traders or this group or that. But once you take control away you take away your game. Think about it, not being in control is a sense of helplessness, such as a traffic jam, you cant move your helpless, and you’re ;). Or when your computer locks up for 20 seconds trying to load a web page, your helpless, its frustrating because for those 20 seconds there’s nothing you can do. Once you relax the rules, once you return the control to the players. Once you realize you cant code your way out of every problem, you will have your game back. I cant even change themes on this forum anymore, horray puke green forever.

All I'm Saying is this, You all are so deep into the problem of how to save SMR, that you are way off on a distant island compared to where you should be looking for the problem. Give the power back to people, give us choices and let us bend the game a little. The players are here; they are waiting for you to revive the game they used to know.

I will post more thoughts when I have them.

[Blade]

I had a long talk with Loty, I understand what he is trying to say. I will move this post

[LotuS]

blade has seen the light, can you?

[Blade]

SMR Needs to go back to basics of what make a game attractive to people, especially new people. All the options of SMR 1.5 are interesting, and cool, and new, but they are doing nothing to fix the game or attract new players because at the core of the current code there are to many basic limitations on players. Our Official rules are pages long. Our manual tells newbies that Alskant is a good race for beginners. Have you ever tried a more boring, limited, pathetic race other than alskant? I haven’t.

Saying something needs to go back to basics says to me you want to rewind the game, sorry, maybe I did misunderstand your post, but maybe be a little clearer, my post is not negative.

[Infinity]

Question Loty, about "giving control back"... Are you saying that we should let the game have bugs and exploits? I have very harsh rules about loopholes and any other "abuse"... So what are you saying?

[LotuS]

no im not saying their should be unfair loopholes allowed, or that all rules should be erased. I think their should be more things your player can do and change things that promote helplessness(could include erasing some rules, modify scripts, change gameplay) I dont make specific sugestions for a reason, its an grand scheme idea, not specific, even though used several examples, they were just that, only examples. Why "force" the game into a state where only big alliances can get force/mines by puting the only CA's in the neutrals? Because it perpetuates the idea that big alliances are the only solution to build up smr. Little guys "newbies" never have a chance in neutrals. Thats why we spent months arguing and decided to not let newbies be visable until they reached beginner ranking. This took control away from the little guys, and gave it to the super alliances of the past, this was a mistake.

We have to look back at what we had, and look forward to what we have now, and combine the good from the old and remove the bad we have implemented. We have old smr in our memories as a guide. Sometimes things do 1 thing on the surface(such as prevent double kills) good idea right? no more bugged deaths, but end up requiring attacker caps, and code which sometimes leaves some out people of important shots or raids or fleet fights. Even tho you have your ships you could loose the fight because of which 10vs10 get chose. The game is in control now in smr 1.5 (NPC's are computer scripts yes?) and not the players.

I want you to make the ideas, SMR 1.6 is the future now, and I want to open your eyes to what really needs to be changed so that the game on a basic level you dont even notice, is highly addictive once again.

And the SMR Rules, they are hyer inflated to the point of something similar to a totitarian regime who takes away all fredom and forces players into set roles.

[zydeco]

I am going to have to agree with Lotus. The current game is so unbalanced that I doubt there are more than ten true newbies in the game. I attibute this to the "why bother" factor. That is the feeling that no matter what you do, you dont stand a chance unless you are in one of the "elite" alliances. When two ships can take down a lvl 35 planet, without dying in the process, then "why bother" to build one? When you can get one-shotted in an upgraded PSF, "why bother"? As Lotus pointed out, new players have much less that half a chance in the current version of this game.

When I first began playing SM, HoA was the dominant alliance. Fighting against them, or trying to succeed in spite of them was still fun and enjoyable. This game however has a large degree of "why bother" built into it. If some kind of balance isn't brought back into the new version, I don't see much hope for this game continuing. I would love to see 60+ people on CPL again. I would love to see rankings that say "xx out of 2300". Let's hope that happens.

[Bonker]

ure neva gona get a good atmosphere like u had in SM partly because of when SM was around Browser games were GOD that was all that the online comunity really had to play and yea it was great but you gotta stop living in the past yea its fun for old vets to come back now n again and play a round of classic have a bit of banter but the game will never be like it was but most gamers tend to hit the RPG / MMo games but to catch the eye of the browser gamers u gotta intrest them with a totaly different playstyle i think along the same lines ofc but upgrade . yea 1.5 might be slacking but u gotta work from that its ure platform learn from it i know ill get moaned at for saying it but look at the Community tdzk had was huge im not saying clone it or anythng but the complexity and size of the game was great. and if the comback to this is "well weve only got limited time on which to spend on the game and design new things" well there's nothin u can do about it jus either play it or dont imo

[Baalzamon]

to reinforce what bonk just said...

Currently #smr has 7 ops, 19 total

Currently the TDZK chat (#redial) has 4 ops, 18 total.

TDZK has been down for over a year and a half now (might be more, I can't remember exactly when it went down). Their community is still active as all hell, and there is supposedly dev work going on (checkout the tdzk login) but its been like that since the game went down. Small updates here and there with scattered announcements from the dev team about the game.

What I'm trying to say is that TDZK obviously did something right, something that we aren't seeing, that made the community so large, and so loyal to stick to it even after all this time of the game being down. Like Bonker, I'm not trying to say clone that game, I enjoyed playing SMR more then I enjoyed playing TDZK, but maybe look into the differences a little closer without having the "argh, I hate tdzk" thought going through your mind.

[Kahless_]

TDZK let people run around like chickens with their heads cut off, spend lots and lots of money and not have to think about what they were doing. Much like 1.5.... Some simple minded individuals enjoy that sort of thing. =)

In the end, the reason TDZK was successful is that it had a simple premise. You make money and exp, you spend money, you make more money. SMR 1.0 was also wonderfully simple yet allowed for a level of complexity. 1.5 is trying to be a complicated version of TDSMRZK.