Abandoned stars and new players

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It seems to be very common that people will install a game, play it for 5 minutes, decide it's not for them and then uninstall it (or just never play it again anyway).

For many games, this isn't a problem. But not so in War Worlds: if a player creates an empire, they'll be assigned a star in the universe, and then that star will be occupied forever - or at least until someone else comes along and wipes it out. The other problem it causes is that people will tend to start very far away from active players, which makes for a rather boring game.

What is an abandoned star?

Before we can do anything about them, it's a good idea to define exactly what an abandoned star is.

Basically, I have defined an "abandoned star" as any star where the empire has not logged in for 2 or more weeks, and this is the only star they have colonized.

Looking through the database right now, there are 5,887 stars which match the above criteria, which is quite a lot!

What to do about abandoned stars?

The next question is, what do we want to do about them? Before today, we did nothing: they just sat there waiting to be attacked and colonized by someone else.

But starting from today, abandoned stars will be elligible for new players to start on.

There's a few extra criteria before we'll start a new player on an abandoned star, however. The main one is that an abandoned star must be > 200 parsecs from any non-abandoned stars. Many of the abandoned stars in the game are surrounded by established players, and it wouldn't exactly be fair to star a new player off in the deep end like that.

So now, when a new player starts the game, we first look for an abandoned star more than 200 parsecs from an existing player, and only if we don't find one will we star the new player on a brand new star.

My hope is that, over time, the game world will fill out a bit more closely and we won't have vast spances of space where nobody is playing any more.

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