I've been playing this game since almost the beginning, although the past 3 or so month i have been like 90% retired I help out with legion building.

So lets go back 3 or 4 years when the game was peaking and we the Dysonians were the hated ones, what made the game alive was PVP and I have always been a strong opponent of PVP as I was always into NPC's. The first real blow in the game was lag, Dan did a good job of trying to address this issue. you know those on the receiving end hated it but the concept of a group of any legion where 3 to 5 people could pound a player who was online was great and there was real interaction and real action defenses vs onslaught. and it was 60 / 40 in favor of the defender, who sometimes had to stay awake long hours to defend. Much like exotica

The second blow is ongoing and that is the constant buildup of a ship without Dan introducing a counter for this. For us larger ships and who have AP per hour in the Hundreds of thousands our ships grow at an alarming rate. each day we could bring in 50 plus rescued prisoners or whatever plus other artifacts that bolster hull and everything else.

What used to take seconds to kill a big bird can now take minutes if a guy has 500k hull plus.

I would propose that at certain levels or achievements top ships get a counter to this like not a 50 increase to weapons but a 1000 increase to weapons Each new arti that comes out is such small numbers that they may be great to weaker ships but to larger ships they are meaningless.

Now you ask wont this do the same thing you just making ships stronger? In a way yes! however you are also making them quicker to kill take attack out of the defense equation and increase the damage caps i hit a guy who has 500k hull i cant seem to go past 2400 or whatever per shot and the randomness makes it rather closer to 1200 a shot.

now we all know there seems to be no feasibility to programming for us oldies who already have 1 foot in the grave, however you have to think of the broader implications if people become more involved like they used to real live attack and defense then that sparks life into the game, and secondly new players can see that there is no real future no incentive to reach the top. The game changed somewhere in its life from a great community game to one of simply collecting and building.

I advocate now a end to building take the richest most advanced ship and stop there, you will lose some players but those who stay focus on other aspects of the game other than building the greatest wealth empire or the highest AP production. All we have right now is the top 100 players hogging the best planets that have probably mostly been found already.

There are obviously going to be objections to this but everyone has to think about this this growth curve has no end other than either the game ending or the player leaving. and they generally accelerate meaning if you think a guy is hard now wait a week or a month. We can grow up to 10 000 attack a month so what is an arti that has just 70 attack or defense to us. The general principle of this proposal applies to everyone here

Your missing the point, the top ships are already the ships with 100K+ APH, all you would do is make it even harder to beat them, you need to do it inversed, maybe call it "intergalictic wanted list" where due to being say top 50 pvp, you get a penelty to your stats due to npcs constantly attacking you for your "wanted spot" say 1% a spot working up, and increaseing the damage cap by the same amount. that way the spots change and its a real challenged to stay in place. (so the number 1 pvper would have -50% attack/defnese/cloak/scan/hull/sheild AND +50% damage cap) However you should get a good per for staying on top, maybe your legion gets a % better base payout. (so say you and your legion mate were number 1 and number 50 on the top list) your whole legion gets say (2 % per spot) 52% more base payout. and of course achievement points/titles/fancy avatars.