Open Letter to Haxus from French Empire

[Xantheose]

"Don't use tls, then everyone can see/modify your requests but at least you know that your password probably leaked"

Hahaha how is the life in Bombay?

I guess you don't have any password on your wifi, for the same reasons, or any keys from your home, at least you can be vigilant.

[Ripticus]

And in regard to HTTPS, I have my own opinion, which is better left to the other topic.

Since it's not rational, I agree.

It's rational, based on deep knowledge of both principles and current infrastructure in use.
To put it short: it's no safer than plain HTTP, since you just put a blind trust on a system you don't understand. With HTTP, you at least know it COULD be unsafe. With HTTPS, you have a false sense of "safety", which is only true when you actually know how it works. Many a people do not, and even more unwittingly trust sites masked by wildcard certificates installed by their "antiviruses".

The thing you see is that this game lacks players, to have played it strongly from 2012 to 2014, I remember a relatively large community of players for a pre-pre-pre Alpha game. (around 80 players permanently connected, which contrasts sharply with the average of ten today).

So, as far as your comments about https are concerned, they are null and void because only a public informed of this knowledge would understand this.
However, it is to reassure people a minimum on the first thing they see in the game, namely the website ... And that must be 15-20 years that we hear everywhere in the media that it is better to avoid taking out the blue card on a site that does not have this little "s" at the end of the http. Since it is deeply rooted in the minds, many give up the idea of ​​playing this game when they were ready to pay.

We know enough about this problem on our side because we do not advertise this game badly in order to swell the ranks of our empire. This remark on https is therefore based on an observation of human behavior and not on software engineering theory.

All in all, I tell myself that obviously, if you are not able to understand something so simple, it should be easy to manipulate you ?.


En français pour les copains (oui j'ai encore utilisé Google trad, j'ai trop la flemme):

Le truc voyez vous, c'est que ce jeu manque de joueurs, pour y avoir jouer fortement de 2012 à 2014, je me souviens d'une communauté de joueurs relativement importante pour un jeu en pre-pre-pre Alpha. (environ 80 joueurs connecté en permanence, ce qui contraste fortement avec la moyenne d'une dizaine aujourd'hui).

Donc, en ce qui concerne vos propos au sujet du https, ils sont nul et non avenu car seul un public averti de ces connaissances comprendrais cela.
Hors, il s'agit de rassurer les gens un minimum sur la première chose qu'ils voient du jeu, a savoir le site internet... Et cela doit bien faire 15-20ans que l'on entend partout dans les médias qu'il vaux mieux eviter de sortir la carte bleu sur un site qui n'a pas ce petit "s" a la fin du http. Étant donné que cela est ancré profondément dans les esprits, beaucoup abandonnent l'idée de jouer a ce jeu alors qu'ils étaient prêt a payer.

Nous connaissons suffisamment ce problème de notre côté car nous faisons pas mal de publicité pour ce jeu afin de grossir les rangs de notre empire. Cette remarque sur le https est donc fondé sur un constat de comportement humain et non sur de la theorie d'ingénierie software.

Somme toute, je me dis que visiblement, si vous n'êtes pas capable de comprendre quelque chose d'aussi simple, il devrait être aisé de vous manipuler ?.

[AnrDaemon]

The "pre-pre-pre alpha" was more consistent and sequential.
The current state I can only describe as homogeneous and messy.

[Ripticus]

So you can't read more than 4 lines.
Shabby ....

[AnrDaemon]

Personal attacks are the best you can do?

[Ripticus]

No, but for you to see it, you would have to read more than 4 lines.

Pathetic.

[Vhwatgoes]

Here is my constructive reply. Unlike many other comments in this thread, I don't have any ill intent, and actually enjoy and play the game currently.

1. You need critics, not yes men.

•  I don't think Haxus intentionally surrounds himself with people who always agree with him. If you feel there is a lack of criticism, you should be the first to step up and deliver some. This post is a start.
  

2. Community

•  In terms of player count, this universe is definitely pretty weak. I can tell you players old and new are dropping off like flies over freezes and limbo. The game is just not stable yet, and it generates a lot of frustration when you finally make the time to sit down and play some Hazeron only for your only avatar to become disconnected 10 minutes into your session, you have an asteroid that destroys your world in a matter of hours, and there is nothing you can do but wait for Haxus to personally attend to you. I have thankfully not encountered too much of this, but I can guarantee every single player experiences it several times in their first week. That is substantially higher than your standard video game where it should be a one in a million occurrence.
  

• To your point about "This game is breaking apart and loosing everyone's interest." how about we look at that. The lack of new players is due to the ridiculous learning cliff. The game is easy once you have a grasp, but there are not a lot of resources or support for new players. We could all be helping with this if we want to play with more people.
  

• It's pointless to complain about there being bugs. Unfortunately we have to accept that this one-man project will have bugs. He doesn't have a QA team at his side, and this game is too complex for him to run through for every patch. The difference between this, Minecraft and Rimworld, is Haxus is the only one-man team in the world trying to develop a totally persistent MMO, which many would say is a stupidly unrealistic project. We are facing those reasons why it is so.
  

3. Testing

•  Right. I joined at the tail end of the etherium troubles, and most of the issues seem to have left by now. I don't know if there is much point in complaining about that event because I don't know how he could practically test for the issues he ended up facing. He does have a test universe to himself, I believe. However as we know there was a lot of trouble anyways.
  

• You'll have to get a real answer from him on this point, and why problems exist in Hazeron.
  

4. HTTPS

•  Sure, why not. It shouldn't need to be a discussion.
  

5. Limbo

•  Again, it will need a direct answer for why there are problems. Don't read the armchair developer replies. Another space game developer spoke of a system where if a server crashed, it's state would be transferred to a fresh new server where it could continue. Idk how feasible that is here, but it's a thought. 
  

• Limbo will be the breaking point for many players, and will kill any steam release unless they are ironed out. It's also something you can only fix after finding occurrences of it in the universe. It absolutely needs work or at the very least get workarounds for the players. Avatar recalling is already a kind of work-around for getting stuck. I would endorse an avatar rollback feature or a "Spawn at home" option at the character select screen, which always works, but it doesn't solve the issue of ships or systems getting stuck.
  

6. Gameplay and recent features

• I would like to open up this topic more. I suspect Hazeron might be becoming a different game than you expected. Haxus eluded in his "When will hazeron be done?" post that what the game is now is not the same vision he had decades ago for the game. I just came from a terrible Warframe binge, a game that just added multicrew spaceships after starting out as a run and gun ninja shooter. The game is nothing like they envisioned it to be 7 years ago. My point is that it's not unusual for games that run this long to change very much over their lifetime. 
  

• Now the features. After using the new ships and buildings for some time now, I am satisfied with their additions and find they create a significant amount of role playing potential. I do plan to publish a full designer guide along with techniques as I seem to be the only active proficient user at the moment, and it is a hurdle for newcomers. There are no stability issues here, but room to improve. There are many many blueprints available now, and almost everything you could ever need, but it is also flooded and difficult to navigate. We can talk more about this. I don't want to have to make a list of ideal designs, because they are scattered between different publishers, and there are a lot of designs with substantial flaws and noob traps. The wiki also needs to document more of it.
  
  
• I would like to start the discussion that while the conquest gameplay of Hazeron is utterly unique, it is and always has been broken by design. Trying to turn this into a competitive game I feel is unrealistic. It's just far too easy to exploit, and it's not well designed for fun or accessibility, the objectives aren't good. One man will never keep up with whatever metagame is formed. The best strategy will be made, and that will be it. There's no space fleet RTS, or LotGH style battles.  The community first needs an attitude to have fun. Organize space battles, but losing territory can be a soul crushing loss. I believe and I find the game plays best as a role playing game. That means casual space encounters, not all out eternal war. That means getting into character and declaring and organizing formal battles, not stabbing someone in the back while they are offline. There can be mechanisms added for this, and I'd love to see something like the story editor return. 
  

7. Harder Decay

• I must stress that as a player of a small empire, I will argue it is actually way easier. The Land system gives empires a suitable expansion limit that is super easy to manage within, but an empire such as yours should have no problem acquiring thousands of systems with so many players. The land system however reduces the value of scoring empires by system count. It never really represented empires well, and imo should be some significant objective such as a ringworld count instead or special research, another discussion for later. I don't think the reasons would be limited server resources, I find it to be a an equalizer between large empires and newer empires. Did you see Weltreich in U5? That was the largest empire ever made, the vast majority by a single player that actively crushed newcomers. Nobody was ever going to match up to that. The tighter expansion limits are harder on those that seriously want to expand, and you still can, but  it's far easier for those that expand within their means. My account alone could double your empire's score on the leaderboard in a day, but that would be it. I don't want 60 systems because that's stupid. Combined with the removal of ship and crew size gates, the game is more fair towards new players, which we all want.
  

• The loss of ghost cities is a bit sad, I do remember those being cool, but I think this is a net positive change. Now the cities you find will be of active players instead.
  
• Asking why he's not open about server costs might be a cultural difference, but his finances are private and they should stay that way. This is a level of transparency we don't need because it's just not appropriate to ask for. It's also not really our problem to speculate on if the hardware can handle the universe, it hasn't been an issue ever.
  

8. Balance

• I suspect you play Hazeron mostly, if not solely for the war. There are a lack of players to destroy, the space is too big to find them, your interactions often mean conflict. The space might be big, but that's because it is. There are too many galaxies, and the fact there is a single bottleneck to pass between them locks almost all small empires out of ever travelling to them. Large empires such as your own ensure that, so you are off and away in a galaxy nobody plays in. I am in agreement actually that they should almost all be removed. While I don't play for the war, there is too much space to meet other players. I actually think there should only be a single path, and just between Shores of Hazeron and Veil of Targoss. It's harmful to segregate the two, and like EVE I think it would be more natural to have an accessible safe zone. There could be a true social hub in the center of the veil to show off ships and stuff, it would be a lot of fun. The incentives to enter the conflict zone would be for greater chance at higher quality resources, but also ringworlds, which should be substantially rare if not impossible to occur in the veil. Stargates should also be impossible to the veil. 
  
• It did seem super common to see Q255 resources now, I wasn't aware it was intentionally made more common, but this again equalizes the empires. We can now truly have a level endgame where the last measure is ship designs, fleet sizes, and space battle tactics. I do desire some objective worth contesting, such as ringworlds, but they too can offer like 21+ remote controlled ships which is a large advantage. It should be a discussion though, Haxus probably doesn't know what he would change to make a reason to fight. The last reason would be for role play. Many games play just fine using this, so I don't feel it to be too much of a sticking point.
  

9. Warp progression

• The last gate. Warp has a lot of value now, it always sort of has. It produces emissions even from ships, which is awesome, but also helps detect and find empires. It is a whole era of an empire's gameplay. Each level of warp opens them up to more and more of the galaxy, and in the meantime you can be playing around the smaller spaces of sectors you have. 
  

• Progression has always been a problem with the game. The patent system was an attempt to flatten it versus the rng of the TL system, and we know the attempts after that. I think it is best that it be playable for new empires, otherwise regular galaxy resets can be used to repeatedly level the field. 
  

10. Gen IV avatars

• I think they're hilarious. The resource usage is a bit concerning, but they have boobs so it's okay. I hope they are given the crazy monster-making sliders like Gen 3.
  

11. Final complaints

• It's useless to complain about a fix coming too late. He fixed it, and it should be celebrated. You're just complaining about stuff he added that you've wanted for a while. What do you really want? It's too late, maybe he shouldn't have bothered? It's not constructive, I think your frustration is just coming through strong in your final words.
  

12. My take on the game and what we should do.

• I think you need to step back and ask yourself what you want from the game, and constructively work with Haxus in achieving that. I too wish the conquest gameplay could be good, but I just don't think it's possible with one man. The game has other unique qualities that still sets it apart from all other games, and I'm certain there is a market for, such as it's numerous role-playing mechanics and emergent gameplay with other players, plus player designed empires and starships. The conquest should be a side feature of that and not the center, because it will sink.
  
• Being constructive means being open about what you want, with good intentions. Most of us want the game to succeed and to play the game we want.  It's can be frustratingly slow to watch, but If you want to play old hazeron, that time has past. It's a new Hazeron now with new strengths and it's still changing. We need to be realistic that Haxus is one dude and he also wants a certain game, but despite that I believe that the game is still groundbreaking and will greatly improve.
  
• Help report bugs, tell Haxus what you like, make suggestions that you think he can feasibly add. Just motivating him will develop the game faster. Otherwise, enjoy the game and helping new players will solidify the playerbase.
  

Thanks for reading. The TL;DR is: just read it. the subject is too complex to be shortened, and the game has too many facets that we can be talking about. If you really don't want to read the counterpoints, at least take away point #12. Major suggestions deserving of dedicated threads are bolded.

[StarOri]

That's incredible, finally a useful comment!

I agree with most of your points, I'll only answer when I have things to point out.

1. You need critics, not yes men.

•  I don't think Haxus intentionally surrounds himself with people who always agree with him. If you feel there is a lack of criticism, you should be the first to step up and deliver some. This post is a start.
  

Oh no we aren't saying he's choosing those guys, it was mainly to say that he should listen and even look for critics. People always saying "it's perfect" doesn't help. It was also a way to introduce that wall of text which is mainly composed of.. critics ^^

2. Community

•  In terms of player count, this universe is definitely pretty weak. I can tell you players old and new are dropping off like flies over freezes and limbo. The game is just not stable yet, and it generates a lot of frustration when you finally make the time to sit down and play some Hazeron only for your only avatar to become disconnected 10 minutes into your session, you have an asteroid that destroys your world in a matter of hours, and there is nothing you can do but wait for Haxus to personally attend to you. I have thankfully not encountered too much of this, but I can guarantee every single player experiences it several times in their first week. That is substantially higher than your standard video game where it should be a one in a million occurrence.
  

• To your point about "This game is breaking apart and loosing everyone's interest." how about we look at that. The lack of new players is due to the ridiculous learning cliff. The game is easy once you have a grasp, but there are not a lot of resources or support for new players. We could all be helping with this if we want to play with more people.
  

Well I think there are already a ton of resources for new players, the problem is mainly to get up to date content (and also for new players to know if the content they're currently looking at is up to date or not). It's another argument for the fact it doesn't help to refactor everything that was working nicely before. For the lack of players my guess is it's mainly due to the way the website looks, and all the (breaking) bugs. It's also due to the learning cliff as you say indeed, but I think the reasons I just named are doing the most damage here.

• It's pointless to complain about there being bugs. Unfortunately we have to accept that this one-man project will have bugs. He doesn't have a QA team at his side, and this game is too complex for him to run through for every patch. The difference between this, Minecraft and Rimworld, is Haxus is the only one-man team in the world trying to develop a totally persistent MMO, which many would say is a stupidly unrealistic project. We are facing those reasons why it is so.
  

Of course bugs are inevitable. But too many bugs are a problem, that's what we meant. Haxus should really try his best to ship less bugs, to make the game less buggy. Because it's what it is currently, and has been for years. And it seems to be getting worse - and it is driving away players. 

• I would like to open up this topic more. I suspect Hazeron might be becoming a different game than you expected. Haxus eluded in his "When will hazeron be done?" post that what the game is now is not the same vision he had decades ago for the game. I just came from a terrible Warframe binge, a game that just added multicrew spaceships after starting out as a run and gun ninja shooter. The game is nothing like they envisioned it to be 7 years ago. My point is that it's not unusual for games that run this long to change very much over their lifetime. 
  

Well yeah, Haxus can do whatever he want with his game obviously. But we wanted to point out we had more fun before. OnePercent feels the same, I would love to hear other old players about that (even Anr seemed to agree, I guess it's a huge clue there lol)

7. Harder Decay

• I must stress that as a player of a small empire, I will argue it is actually way easier. The Land system gives empires a suitable expansion limit that is super easy to manage within, but an empire such as yours should have no problem acquiring thousands of systems with so many players. The land system however reduces the value of scoring empires by system count. It never really represented empires well, and imo should be some significant objective such as a ringworld count instead or special research, another discussion for later. I don't think the reasons would be limited server resources, I find it to be a an equalizer between large empires and newer empires. Did you see Weltreich in U5? That was the largest empire ever made, the vast majority by a single player that actively crushed newcomers. Nobody was ever going to match up to that. The tighter expansion limits are harder on those that seriously want to expand, and you still can, but  it's far easier for those that expand within their means. My account alone could double your empire's score on the leaderboard in a day, but that would be it. I don't want 60 systems because that's stupid. Combined with the removal of ship and crew size gates, the game is more fair towards new players, which we all want.
  

• The loss of ghost cities is a bit sad, I do remember those being cool, but I think this is a net positive change. Now the cities you find will be of active players instead.
  

That's the part I agree the least with you (I totally agree about the limbo part btw). The fact people need to add systems to their land and keep paying is a pain in the ass to a multiplayer empire. Because people can forget, and people can stop paying for a few months to come back later. Before we just had to visit systems, and we had enough time to see when it was needed before decay occuring, so we could keep the stuff of inactive players. Now it's just pressing a button, and if you forget your city is lost within a few days (for example if you are still building it and need to do things for a few days and can't get ingame, it can be enough to lose it). And btw is that functionnality clear for a new player? My guess is it's not, and again it's way too quick so people doesn't have enough time to react/learn.

The least Haxus could do is asking to add to land or not >when creating a city< in a uncolonized system, something like that. So it's not hidden somewhere.

It was also another way to ask "why this change" I guess, why change this when the previous ways were fine. Why do this, while not fixing far greater issues first?

And no, now you'll find nothing since the game is huge and there's like 10 active players :P
Ghost cities were fun and helped to hide that fact.

It's also not really our problem to speculate on if the hardware can handle the universe, it hasn't been an issue ever.

It is quite. I've always heard it was an issue. There is server lag sometimes, and there were at the restart (we think, we may be wrong here). It can be a problem because it's costing him money, maybe more than needed. The 2014 shutdown happened because he couldn't pay for them any more while the game was free (IIRC).

• The last gate. Warp has a lot of value now, it always sort of has. It produces emissions even from ships, which is awesome, but also helps detect and find empires. It is a whole era of an empire's gameplay. Each level of warp opens them up to more and more of the galaxy, and in the meantime you can be playing around the smaller spaces of sectors you have. 
  

• Progression has always been a problem with the game. The patent system was an attempt to flatten it versus the rng of the TL system, and we know the attempts after that. I think it is best that it be playable for new empires, otherwise regular galaxy resets can be used to repeatedly level the field. 
  

Yup warp is nice and its new functionalities are nice too. But waiting for 2 entire months to get warp 8 is total bullshit here. We should have ways to reduce the time required I dunno. Maybe these patents should cost a huge amount of money intead of a huge amount of time. Waiting for a process to finish is not fun. Creating cities to get enough money is a little more (though not that fun too x))

11. Final complaints

• It's useless to complain about a fix coming too late. He fixed it, and it should be celebrated. You're just complaining about stuff he added that you've wanted for a while. What do you really want? It's too late, maybe he shouldn't have bothered? It's not constructive, I think your frustration is just coming through strong in your final words.
  

I may have not phrased that correctly. The idea was to point his troubles at priorizing. Creating nice entry conditions for new players (like a free try period) should come first, before refactoring the designer for example.

12. My take on the game and what we should do.

• I think you need to step back and ask yourself what you want from the game, and constructively work with Haxus in achieving that. I too wish the conquest gameplay could be good, but I just don't think it's possible with one man. The game has other unique qualities that still sets it apart from all other games, and I'm certain there is a market for, such as it's numerous role-playing mechanics and emergent gameplay with other players, plus player designed empires and starships. The conquest should be a side feature of that and not the center, because it will sink.Being constructive means being open about what you want, with good intentions. Most of us want the game to succeed and to play the game we want.  It's can be frustratingly slow to watch, but If you want to play old hazeron, that time has past. It's a new Hazeron now with new strengths and it's still changing. We need to be realistic that Haxus is one dude and he also wants a certain game, but despite that I believe that the game is still groundbreaking and will greatly improve.Help report bugs, tell Haxus what you like, make suggestions that you think he can feasibly add. Just motivating him will develop the game faster. Otherwise, enjoy the game and helping new players will solidify the playerbase.

Just helping new players won't be enough. The issue here is at the root of Haxus planning and "product ownership". As long as this is not fixed, this game will have a hard time getting anywhere and attracting new players. Thus being in danger of disappearing. I guess this was kinda the purpose of that wall of text, I should have put what I just said in there. It's not really we want the old SoH back, it's we think the old one was better and as such we have concerns about the current direction. Of course Haxus may not agree with us here but it's worth a try.

Can someone link this thread to him the next time he's online? It has been more than a week now... By the way if I might add, I'd say this is another example of the issue here. It's not normal that it's that hard to reach Haxus (we can't phone him obviously).

[Deantwo]

...

Yes this is good. I agree with everything you said.

---

War Gameplay

Haxus has never promoted Hazeron as a war game, so if that is the only gameplay you want it might be time to look elsewhere. Current war gameplay in Hazeron is basically ruining the losers fun and breaking everything that keeps them playing. There are some hardcore fighting players that don't mind losing and will fight back again, but that doesn't help when the ultimate win condition is to make the opponent ragequit.

That is why I have agreed so much with the idea of a thunderdome galaxy/box. Some place where you can do all the fighting you want with other players that are ok with losing. And there will be an actual win condition and a reset when the galaxy/box is won.

But even with that, you probably wouldn't see finely balance ship combat or fair city conquest mechanics. Haxus is clearly not interested in Hazeron as a war game, so he likely won't put much effort into it, he never has. He is only one man and simply can't make this a super balanced war game even if he wanted to. If you have suggestions you can make a suggestion thread with details and statistics, then I am sure Haxus wouldn't mind looking it over and tweak whatever numbers and mechanics you want, but it won't magically be balanced to competitive perfection.

---

Hazeron as a Game

Haxus has once mentioned how he wants Hazeron to be as a game, at least vaguely. He wanted it to be a universe with player created empires as the backdrop to a cool science fiction adventure. Probably with non-emperor players that can fly around with their ship and do quests and explore brave new worlds.

This can be seen by looking at how a lot of the features promote this. Your ship can be respawned when lost, Haxus actively discouraging large fleets, and the way the relic storyline is made.

I am sure the direction of the game has changed quite a bit from that original idea. Portions of the community has wanted it to be a war game, so Haxus added stuff to make some of their dreams work. Another portion of the community wanted to just build cities and ships, so we got a non-PvP zone to not have the two fight too much. And many other players that want something in-between or totally different from the two groups. I can't even tell you which group I belong to or why I play the game, I mostly prefer the social aspect and helping other players.

This is one of the core issues with Hazeron though. Haxus hasn't clearly stated what the greater picture is or what he wants to do. We all want different things from the game and Haxus is just trying to be a good host by pleasing everyone at once. The solution for this is however very simple, Haxus just needs to publicly share his vision for the end product, so we can all stop projecting our own hope and dreams onto the game and get angry when it goes another way than we would want.

There is no way to "fix" the game if we don't know what the "game" is.

[StarOri]

War Gameplay

Haxus has never promoted Hazeron as a war game, so if that is the only gameplay you want it might be time to look elsewhere. Current war gameplay in Hazeron is basically ruining the losers fun and breaking everything that keeps them playing. There are some hardcore fighting players that don't mind losing and will fight back again, but that doesn't help when the ultimate win condition is to make the opponent ragequit.

We never said it's the "only gameplay" we want. Not sure if you're doing what you do best here again...

It's a part of the game that provide activity and purpose. It tends to bring people together and to create an entire new way to play this game with diplomacy, backstabbing etc. I'm not saying it's vital to the game, but if the idea is to allow this while not doing it properly, then why make it possible in the first place? Taking this path only brings frustration and people leaving. A competitive multiplayer game without balance will always be flawed, because there will be people that'll like to destroy your stuff and you won't be able to do anything about it, that'll never help long term. Even "carebear" players will leave due to bad guys eventually if they don't have any chances.

This has always been a problem with the possibility of griefing, but it actually often caused people to band together and kick asses, which are one of the best time you can get playing this game, especially when you are bored: when you have explored everything construction-wise. I mean, if people were fine with the current state of the game there wouldn't be only 10 active players on weekend at most. But anyway I don't really expect solo-empire's players to understand that.

That is why I have agreed so much with the idea of a thunderdome galaxy/box. Some place where you can do all the fighting you want with other players that are ok with losing. And there will be an actual win condition and a reset when the galaxy/box is won.

Indeed that's a nice idea if Haxus objective is really for SoH to be the Veil of Targoss "experience" by default. That's a far more viable solution than creating 20 galaxies anyway.

It's the idea behind the "jobs" window as you say, the "adventure SoH". But is it a surprise that it's the part of the game that got the least changes on the last 7 years?..

But even with that, you probably wouldn't see finely balance ship combat or fair city conquest mechanics. Haxus is clearly not interested in Hazeron as a war game, so he likely won't put much effort into it, he never has. He is only one man and simply can't make this a super balanced war game even if he wanted to. If you have suggestions you can make a suggestion thread with details and statistics, then I am sure Haxus wouldn't mind looking it over and tweak whatever numbers and mechanics you want, but it won't magically be balanced to competitive perfection.

Indeed, if Haxus is not interested in having success with his game. 
And we're not talking of perfection here, again you make us say things we didn't said.

This is one of the core issues with Hazeron though. Haxus hasn't clearly stated what the greater picture is or what he wants to do. We all want different things from the game and Haxus is just trying to be a good host by pleasing everyone at once. The solution for this is however very simple, Haxus just needs to publicly share his vision for the end product, so we can all stop projecting our own hope and dreams onto the game and get angry when it goes another way than we would want.

Well that's quite a surprise there for me, but at the same time I'm not really surprised. That may be the main problem here, that's totally possible. 

It's quite unsettling if it's true: going seriously on a game for an entire decade, paying hundred of dollars per month... without even knowing where to go. Seriously.