I don’t have any clear goals about the scoreboard, though I have always wanted to see a ship legitimately earn 1,000,000 gold… Anyways the reason I started thinking about this is because we’re coming up on 2 years since the last hard reset. The oldest ship in the database was launched on April 22, 2015. The bottom ship on the in-game scoreboard has more than 140K.
I agree with what you said; it sucks to lose years of effort in building up ships and fleets. But I also consider how overwhelming the scoreboard might be for a new player, or even for an old mtrek veteran who might just be returning without that 2 year head start.
I wrote a post about it last June, but for whatever reason, I archived the post as a draft and never published it. (Heheh there are many many such articles, posts, and pages here that I’ve never finished/published.) Since it’s such a tough decision to make, I basically was passing the decision off to whoever could reach the rank of “FLEET ADMIRAL *X*” first. It’s a little awkward to say that now, because Pete’s already there as of about a month ago. That’s a milestone/objective that would have been better stated up front and transparently.
I suppose the next question might come with whatever the future of this game holds. There will definitely be more updates at some point. Depending on how they play out in terms of the in-game economy, it might be difficult- or unfair even, for newer ships to compete with older ships. For example, the bots spawn with varying amounts of gold right now, but if we went back to new bots having 0 or little gold, ships’ gold/hour gold/conflict gold/damage ratios will be all out of whack.
I don’t think there’s a perfect answer and there are some unknowns involved here. I’m not comfortable with making a decision like that in a vacuum, especially when you guys have so many hours invested already.
Before April 2015, there were a couple of score resets. My own sentiment has changed over time, but one thing I’ve noticed is that players stop trying when they sense a reset on the horizon. There’s a measurable drop in traffic on the server even. Part of that might be discouragement from losing ones game progress, and the other part is simply, why bother trying to get a new ship up on the board when it’ll be wiped at x time anyways? Equally disheartening is the fallout after a reset. Players have become understandably upset at losing their ships and we might have lost players along the way because of it.
Like I said, my sentiments have changed over time, and just thinking it through as I write this reply, I’ve leaned a little more in favor of NOT resetting the scores at all.