Creators Hour

Creators Hour (Or Creators Question Time as it was orginal known) started in round 2 and became an integral part of Planetarion culture. Here was your chance to get answers to questions directly from Spinner, Vish, Fudge, Zeus, Messiah and later on Oreo and PATeam as well as a place to put forward any ideas you had directly to the creators. While most of the questions and the responces were fairly unintresting it would throw up some intresting comments, ideas and future plans.

Since Jolt took over the running of the game these 'Q&A' sessions have become less frequent and the information coming out of them has become less useful.

'Creators Hour' was brought back after Round 14. One of the PA Team members posted the IRC log of that Creators Hour, but it has since been lost.

Creators Hour #1

Time: Round 2 - Aug 2004

Place: #creators

Galaxy Defence Fleet

<Messiah> Next question:
<Messiah> What is your status on the GDF? When will the GC have control over it? And how much 
<Messiah> control will he actually have?
<Spinner> Yes..The GDF has certainly aroused many people's intrest
<Spinner> We have ot been able to do any work on the GDF yet, as of controloling it
<Spinner> SO an exact date when this is possible, I can not give here
<Spinner> But...
<Spinner> When it is in, it will be possible for the GC to launch it out on missions, attack or  
          defend, as a regular fleet
<Spinner> Except it would require some kind of "GO" from either planets, or pherhaps some new 
          minister.....
<Spinner> So it can not be abused for the GC's own egotripping (-:
<Spinner> The launchcost will then be taken out of the Development Fund
<Spinner> If there is not enough Eonium in there...it can not launch
<Messiah> Some people are concerned that it can be used for transferring fleets with no travel 
<Messiah> time. Will this be the case?
<Spinner> Note that I said nothing about the GC being able to transfer ships out from the GDF
<Spinner> (-:
<Spinner> That answers it I belive

One of the most hotly talked about features of Round 2 was the Galaxy Defence Fleet which was initially unfinished. The basic premise as you have probally guessed was that galaxy members could donate ships to this fleet and they would then be under the control of the GC to use in galactic defence. Due to the fact the the GC couldnt yet control the GDF the fleets in it were initially equally spread across all the planets in the Galaxy. While an idea that had promise the inability of the Creators to find a viable way to let the GC control the fleet resulted in it never getting beyond this basic stage and by round 3 it had dissapeared for good

Commanders Message

<Messiah> What other jobs are GCs going to get?
<Spinner> The GC will be able to control the Galactic Fleet as I said
<Spinner> Nothing more has been planned there now, execept maybe he gets a special 
          Message of the Day thing for his Galaxy

It was the first real mention of a feature that would become a constant feature in the rounds to come

Downtime

<Messiah> How are things going with your line? Is that still what's causing the game to appear 
          to go down sometimes?
* Spinner hopes that was enough
<Spinner> Line, yes...
<Spinner> First of all, within a very short periode of time, we will get some hosting help tp 
          relieve our lines a bit, or upgrade our existing lines
<Spinner> This is a question of money actually....
<Spinner> Which we dont quite make enough of (-: Who does anyway (-:
<Spinner> And our budget right now does not allow us to upgrade the lines
<Spinner> But we have good hopes to earn more on advertising in the future
<Spinner> And also to get some good hosting help
<Zeus> click banners is main income @ mo
<Spinner> The first step will prolly be to put the images and the manual on a totally different 
          line, maybe with the boards
<Zeus> so get fingers clicking:)
<Spinner> So we will have more capacity for our game itself
<Spinner> But I promise
<Spinner> The minute we run this game with a profit
<Spinner> We WILL upgrade lines!

In these early days the demand outsripped teh supply and during busy periods the server would frequently serve up the infamous Burp error page. It was a constant struggle for the creators to stay ahead of the demand and it wouldn't be until Round 3 when Barrysworld took over the hosting of the game that a stable and reliable PA became a true possibility.

P2P and Selling of PA

<Messiah> Is there any chance of Planetarion going commercial in the future, and charging for play?
          If not, is there a planned "end" to planetarion?
<Spinner> Going commercial? I thought we had done that! (-:
<Spinner> There is no plan to charge players tfor playing PLanetarion
<Zeus> :)
<Spinner> Absolutely not
<Zeus> free, made by gamers for gamers
<Spinner> indeed
<Spinner> Thank you , Zeus for handing me word on a golden platter (-:
* Zeus hides
<Messiah> Do you think you'll ever get bored of planetarion, and sell it to some money grabbing 
          corporation?
<Spinner> EA slogan, isnt it?
<Spinner> Or something?
<Spinner> No
<Spinner> Selling Planetarion is not an option either...
<Spinner> We made it because we wanted to make it
<Spinner> And we want to keep making games like it
<Spinner> Because it is fun
<Spinner> We just have to learn how to do it and make a profit (-:
< Spinner> You asked for an "end"...
<Spinner> I am not sure PLanetarion will ever end..
<Spinner> Not as long as poeple play it
<Spinner> Of course, if people stop playing it, well, it sort of has ended...
<Zeus> k
<Spinner> But there will be resets

Something that's all too often hindered Planetarion has been lack or foresight and here is a prime example. Just two rounds later the creators would announce that the game was going P2P which caused uproar amongst players who remembered comments like this. Just 4 rounds after going P2P Planetarion would then be sold off to Jolt after Fifth Seasons went bankrupt.

WAP and SMS

<Messiah> The WAP phone thing that has been mentioned, would it be possible for people without WAP 
          phones to make their own thing, designed for non-WAP phones.
<Spinner> WAP / PDA / SMS services
<Spinner> I am happy to announce, that we are looking at possibilites to have support for some of 
          these things
<Spinner> Next week actually, we will be in a meeting with a company who claims to be able to do 
          all the work for us to implament this, which would be the very best solution
<Spinner> So it doesnt take valuable working hours from us on the core team
<Zeus> :)
<Spinner> But no promises, we still dont know that anyone will do it
<Spinner> But rest assured, we know the wish is out there!

The WAP feature would make an appearance in round 3 and would remain until the bot stopper made WAP access impossible. SMS alerts were a regular request on the suggestions forum at this time as it was seen as a feature that would help those who couldnt be at a PC 24/7 as well as being a source of income for the game. However midway through round 3, when the creators announced they had an SMS feature ready to launch, a backlash against the idea started and the feature was scuppered.

Galaxy Exiles

<Messiah> Are there any plans to implement the "boot" function in the galaxy, where the GC can 
          nominate someone to be kicked out of the galaxy?
<Spinner> Ah, yes, the booting thing
<Spinner> We decided against it the last time, as the poeple asked to share their opinions on the 
          boards were split indeed.
<Spinner> But
<Spinner> We see that some galaxies would definately benefit from soemthing like this, so it might 
          go back onto our to-do list again. But right now, I dont know

When it comes to galaxies, we have it easy today. If a galaxy member isnt pulling their weight or they are in a rival alliance you can exile them and hopefully get a more suitable replacement. Back in Round 1 and 2, things were different. You got a random galaxy and it was up to you to ensure you made the best out of it. There was little room for rivalries. However, as we can see here, opinions were starting to swing and it wouldn't be long before exiling of planets was a possibility.

Round Length

<Messiah> When is the reset?!?
<Spinner> The next reset!
<Spinner> ?
<Spinner> I reckon the game will run about 6 months
<Messiah> yes
<Spinner> Unless something drastic happnes
<Spinner> So 10th of july, plus 6 months..or so...

The general view of the community is that the length of a round is generally about 11 weeks, but this wasn't always the case. Round 1 had run from Feb 2000 until June 2000 with Round 2 lasting around the same length of time. Rounds this long became unsustainable later on, especially after the introduction of P2P, at which point they were slowly reduced to the 11 weeks we know now.

Creators Hour #2

Time: Round 2 - 21 Aug 2004 Place: #creators

Database Dumps

<Spinner> The Tahmer search page is an unauthorized bot page
<Spinner> These days, we are completeing the work on the data that Pbot will access
<Spinner> And it will be available VERY soon
<Spinner> for everyone to use
<vish> this info will be placed on a server outside planetarion so that we do not get that extra 
load
<Spinner> As soon as that is ready, we do not want any loose bots out there using different data

In the early rounds if you wanted to run a site like Pilkara or Sandmans, the only method of gathering the data was through the use of a Data Miner bot. People like Sn0w and Tahmer would create a separate account and set their bot to log into this acocunt to parse all the galaxy pages. This data would then be stored and could then be used by their tools. The two most famous tools at the time were SnOws='s IRC bot PBOT and Tahmers='s website. The amount of bandwidth these bots and others like them took to gather the data, forced the creators to start producing the database dumps that all of today's tools run off of.

Alliance Controls

<Messiah> From Kittenpurr:
<Messiah> Have you got anything planned regarding the limiting or controlling alliance size? 
<Spinner> Yes, but not anything you will see in a very near future
<Spinner> But sometime in this round, something like this will be implemented
<Spinner> The actual way we are doing it is still inside my head.....
<Spinner> In very dynamic forms...
<Spinner> So I dont have detils on this yet

This feature took until round 10 to implement and seems a lot more static than what Spinner had in mind.

Creators Hour Mid Round 3

Time: Round 3 - January 22th 2001 Place: #creators

This Creator's Hour took place just after Barrysworld, the company that was hosting Planetarion, had announced it was bankrupt.

Server Requirements

<Messiah> What type of server are you after? You could try the likes of Yahoo. They're always up for stuff like this and ahve ercently been buying all sort of new web-projects.
<Spinner> Ok
<Spinner> first of all, we need 7-8 machines
<Spinner> in total
<Spinner> and we use approx 10-12 Mbit / Second
<Spinner> SO it si quite a lot
<Spinner> Pherhaps Yahoo can do it
<Spinner> Thanks for the tip
<Spinner> I will check up on that as well
<Spinner> Have 16 companies to check up on nopw
<Spinner> now
<Spinner> hehe
<Spinner> And general intrest to host Planetarion is quite high!
<Spinner> (-:
<Messiah> Do you think that there is any chance you won't get a new hosting within the timelimit ? What will you in that case do ?
<Spinner> We have backup plans to cover us in this event too
<Spinner> We have not had that long to make all details clear yet
<Spinner> But we will have them all sorted out
<Spinner> We do have our old line at PA HQ
<Spinner> Which is now quite bored
<Spinner> (-:
<Spinner> But that is only 2Mbit
<Spinner> But if worst comes to worst
<Spinner> We might be able to borrow some here and there
<Spinner> Cut back on the graphics on the pages
<Spinner> And get away with maybe a total of 6Mbit
<Spinner> its doable
<Zeus> temperially, but only last resort.
<Spinner> But we hope to make this ok without cutting back on quiality
<Spinner> And it is looking good
<Spinner> If anyone feels like gving us a support
<Spinner> This would be a good time to use the mousebuttons more
<Spinner> (-:

While these server requirements may seem like overkill by today's standards, by this point the game had a total of around 130000 players and was growing at a steady rate. In the end the servers moved to Chello, who unfortunately never quite reached the level of service that Barrysworld provided.

Galaxy Sizes

<Messiah> is it true that there will 35 ppl in a glaxery next round
<Spinner> That has not been decided
<Spinner> We have though along those lines
<Spinner> But have been seeing some potential hazards about it

Galaxies of 35 members were on the cards for Round 4. With the game going to a private galaxy setup in Round 4, that certainly would have made things intresting.

Alliance Controls

<Messiah> will you be bringing back the facillity to have alliance tags next to our nmaes?
<Spinner> Maybe
<Spinner> We are thinking it though
<Spinner> through
<Spinner> pros and cons really
<Spinner> But I belive, BELIVE it will be back
<Spinner> But not JUST like it was
<Spinner> In some kind of system

For the second round running the mention of better alliance controls were mentioned. A feature which wouldn't see the light of day into Round 10

Hidden Stats and Formulas

<Messiah> Would you consider next round not releasing stats and equations for the ships, scanning, combat etc. Instead just give a general description of how things work and 
          make us have to gain experience and experiment with things?
<Spinner> IT is an intresting idea
<Spinner> But for a game with tectics and staratgy
<Spinner> it is dangerous
<Spinner> So we do not think so
<Spinner> Would be fun to try though
<Spinner> We cam try it in the beta we run

It's interesting how something that was considered dangerous at this time would pop up later. In Round 10 Spinner experimented with this exact same principle when he only released the very basic ship stats and formulas to the community. It showed that this sort of setup didn't work in Planetarion and it was reverted.

Creators Hour End of Round 3

Time: Round 3 - April 2nd 2001 Place: #creators

This Creators Hour happened at the very end of the round and turned into what we would now call the 'End of Round Ceremony' or EORC

Nostalgia

<vish> > 2k players

2000 players at a Creator's Hour.

Prizes

<Zeus> for this round the prizes are as follows.
<Zeus>  1st Ruler Award  = Dreamcast with 3games tshirt/cap. Offer to pacrew/beta
<Zeus>  2nd Ruler Award  t-shirt/cap two top 5 pc game
<Zeus>  3rd Ruler Award  t-shirt/cap one top 5 pc game
<Zeus>  4th & 5th Ruler Award  t-shirt/cap one top 5 pc game
<Zeus>  5th - upto 10th ruler award t-shirt/cap one top 5 pc game
<Zeus>  1st Galaxy Award  t-shirt/cap one top 5 pc game
<Zeus>  2nd Galaxy Award  t-shirt one top 5 pc game
<Zeus>  3rd Galaxy Award  t-shirt
<Zeus>  Worst Roiding Galaxy Target Award  = high roids less ships
<Zeus>  t-shirt one top 5 pc game to GC

Back in round 3, the game used to offer some fairly good prizes for those who were successful. Winning the round would also get you an invite to be part of PACrew, although its unknown how many people actually took up that offer.

There's a catch

<Spinner> And, many thanks to TheSlammer for sponsoring us with prizes

The prizes were supplied by TheSlammer.com a company who would later become affectionately known as TheScammer.com. They ran a referal scheme with Planetarion to offer players the ability to purchase half price PS2's, all you had to do was purchase the PS2 from them at the market price on upon receiving the unit you could claim half the cost back using the supplied cashback form. However most people either didn't receive their PS2 or their cashback form. Of the few that received both, most didn't get their money back. TheSlammer then pulled a dissappearing act, leaving many players stranded. Most of the above prizes for winners didnt turn up.