TL:DR - PC turns a fun game into a high pressure chore. What can be done to alleviate this?

For those bothered to read on, please allow me to tell you the story of RIFT in Planetary Conquest...

For weeks, if not months before Uprising we at RIFT were extremely excited to play PC. We knew we had enough good enough players and the wallets to back ourselves up. We joined a sizable alliance and grabbed a handful of districts on day 1.

Initially, we did very well and held our ground (with some help from our allies and other friends). The excitement lasted roughly 5 days - we even had decent numbers getting up or staying up until 5am to play the horrible timers we had picked up. Up to Monday we had gone 7 - 2 in all our battles (with one of those losses being due to Grief Uni and we still almost won that one).

Then, we managed to change all our RTs to sensible times when we generally had the most players on and things started to go downhill rather quickly. Suddenly, we realised that less and less people were coming online for the battles. Most of our alliance districts were failing and everyone seemed to have lost interest.

What I put it down to? Player burnout. The initial excitement of something new and fun wore off and suddenly everyone realised that they would have to be on at the same time every single day to defend our districts. The game we all loved playing so much had become a daily mandatory event - almost like a job! People don't like that kind of pressure. At least not for days and days on end. People lost interest.

Now, I fully understand that PC is not meant for casual players and small - medium sized corps are always going to struggle but my point with this post is far more fundamental than that: how can we make Planetary Conquest more fun and less chore-like?