SirEmi,
You may have noticed that many of the new players are not so active anymore and the game is slowly dying. However, they do still login once in a few days, and you still have a chance to revive this amazing game. I suggest you take out AP. Because AP makes activity not very useful anymore, and now people are just logging in to use their APs, then logging out. Besides, if you want to make QP rarer, you could always increase the solars-QP exchange ratio. 500k solars for 1 QP may be good enough. I know that you spent a lot of time on these updates and don't want to make them go to waste, but it WILL go to waste if you don't remove it. I'm generally okay with the front page, but the AP update is just rubbish.
Please, SirEmi, I love this game and the amount of potential it has, but it's your decision whether or not you want to give this game a chance of survival. If you decide to remove APs, at least say it here first so that the AG players will be able to have something to look forward to.
Thanks!
I've been thinking about AP's lately, so here're my thought...
AP is a way to quickly do something if you need to do it quickly--RL calls. For one reason or another you want to finish a particular timer. For example, maybe you set a course for a planet and you want to arrive there before sleeping but you want to go to bed NOW. You spend an AP. 8 minutes left but you need to drive to town NOW! Spend AP, set new course.
Before, there was no way to do it without spending QP, but QP costs money. It's behind a barrier. Sir Emi decided that being able to occasionally do things quick was a feature too important to put a price on.
He knew that players could already emulate this somewhat, although not as smoothly. For example, they could create higher MK modules, like WHG/FTL, and keep them in the cargo, only using them to occasionally speed up travel. If they wnated to speed up combat they could disable modules, but that also meant less combat power in the fight. They could purchase optimizations to speed up manufacturing, but that had a limit. There were other cases, but they all come up short. And all of these things have one thing in common: None of them can finish something instantly.
So Sir Emi asked "How can I create a system like that?" Almost immediately the answer came. There was already a system like this in-place: The QP system! Sir Emi didn't need to be told. It was obvious. But he wanted to keep using QP to encourage players to spend $$$, since speeding up actions or instantly finishing them is something they'll always want. So whatever he added to speed things up would still leave room for the QP system and the revenues from it. He decided to add something which would use or mimic the code and thoughts already in the QP system. He named it the AP system.
The AP system would be free, thus allowing all players to finish things instantly or at least quickly. This was easier than going through the game with a fine tooth comb. Sir Emi could have done that. For example, maybe he could have allowed an "afterburner" feature for travel which used twice the fuel for each level and operated like QP. He could have also added a feature to quickly finish manufacturing tasks, maybe calling it "Boost Manufacture". But many of these things were redundant, since QP already existed. It just made sense then to combine the QP and AP system together instead of having them exist apart.
The probelm--as I see it--is AP can be converted to QP which can be used for things like VIP and officers. So players end up spedning a lot of their AP on things unrelated to the initial reason for adding AP's. If players don't have any AP, they cannot ocassionally speed up actions!!! This is all a consequence of how QP's work and the fact AP's are tied to them. So perhaps Sir Emi will need to find a way to isolate some of the AP's so they cannot be spent on VIP or officers, thus always giving players some points to spend on speeding up or immediately finishing actions.
Which makes me ask if being able to speed up actions was only a part of the original reasoning.
VIP might become hte new minimum, if new players are patient enough to save up 167 days of AP. Would it really be unanticipated if APs just end up giving everybody VIP? I doubt it. Sir Emi must have known when s/he added APs that many players would opt to spend the APs on VIP. In light of this, maybe APs are just a handout to keep players interested? Not only does it give everybody an extra lift,
but it requires you to login every several days, otherwise the APs will cap and stop generating.