Steam

[expert700]

When we talk about 'levelling the playing field', we're talking about one empire, really.

Weltreich. The second-largest empire has a tenth of the worlds.

If you're so scared of Weltreich, then go defeat them yourself! Make a quest out of it! Band together in a great, glorious rebellion against the fascist menace!*


It's true that there aren't many currently-active empires right now, and resetting would get rid of a lot of left-over gaff. But I also think that it would destroy the history of this universe, like it or not. The universe is huge, and as I've said in the discord, most of it is still untouched beyond being scanned. If you go to another galaxy, you'll never even know it wasn't reset. We could easily get the best of both worlds just by Haxus moving the Default galaxy to be a different one.

-snip-


* -- In my experience, by the way, Mortius has been nothing but a helpful person. Maybe back in the days where he had competition he was more of a warmonger (from what I've heard, since I wasn't really around then), but he's genuinely a cool dude. I don't get where all this stuff about 'stomping newbies' comes from. The only time he killed me was when he accidentally broke my life support while we were hanging out, and, like, I ended up crashing maybe seven more of my own ships that same day, so it wasn't exactly an impactful death.

I DO see him cleaning up after empires that have left, but that's... not noobstomping.

I'm aligned with Mortius, it's not really the threat of Weltreich that has me here shilling for a reset. He is vicious though. I saw him bring that great big cylindrical ship the size of a moon down on tackeart's city before setting it on fire! And then he stalked tackeart to the northern cluster, did it again, then curbstomped some other empire and forced them to become tackeart's vassal! Oh, and I just don't understand how he could be so cruel to Fasgort. He just wanted to play the game, yet Mortius pursued him to the end of the earth so that he could mount his head on a wall!

On a more serious note, you are right that the universe has history. That history, though, isn't all it's cracked up to be. Let's take glory control as an example. When we all think of glory control, we imagine some grand syndicate metropolis. In reality, it's just an incredibly laggy system with the former syndicate cities always on the verge of decaying, rendered useless by the new buildings, and a few founded by Black Wave to provide a source of (PAAA?) super soldiers. What is there really to preserve? The history lies in the stories of what happened there, and those aren't going to disappear with a reset.

What would disappear is three years of garbage piled on top of that poor eastern cluster. Here's what it looks like on the largest starmap I have access to.

That's hardly a dynamic and exciting universe. Deantwo sits off on the side, occasionally visiting new players. Mortius is scattered all over, but mostly uninvolved in the operations of individual locations. No one really knows what the French do... In the gaps inbetween, there are either the remnants of old empires that no one has bothered to take over yet, or some poor new player, clueless to what's going on around them. And that's the most populated part of the galaxy! There's hardly any interaction anymore with the player count so low, and it's just painful to see. If Haxus just moved the spawn locations to a different galaxy, that would only serve to further fragment the player base. I understand that built up empires (bar Weltreich) would be frustrated by a reset, but they would probably all keep playing. It's rarely frustration with the mechanics or performance anymore than has people leaving the game—now, it's mostly just boredom.

I'm concerned, like I think everyone else here is too, about what would happen if the Steam release flew under the radar and had very little effect on the player counts. As I've said before, we have a clear option that has proven in the past to bring back old players and will again. We need the universe to be as vibrant and exciting during the Steam release is possible, because there is no second chance. Haxus has made clear that he doesn't want to place the game in early access, so Hazeron will only get the one release. The way I see it, the player count is what is most important to the player experience in Hazeron. Personally, I follow a regular cycle: get bored of playing Hazeron because of extremely low player counts, stop playing, then eventually get drawn back in for one reason or another. Rinse and repeat. I notice that a lot of us follow that same cycle, but far more players got bored and left permanently.

Anything that increases the player count is worth it, because interacting with players is what makes Hazeron worth playing! When I think of the most memorable and exciting moments I've experienced in Hazeron, it's not building cities that comes to mind. I think of that time that I successfully tracked someone (tackeart) down in a matter of hours after they left the area to try and hide, or the time that me and Mortius lured a certain Fasgort in with false promises to discover his location and prevent him from escaping the galaxy. I want to have more experiences like that, because that's what keeps me interested in the game. Too many people treat Hazeron like a singleplayer game with irc, but that's not what it was meant to be.