Actually, it does take a god-awful amount of time. I should know- that's why I quit twice in a row. It's fine if you have absolutely nothing else to do all day, every day, but if you even want to skim through and FIND the basic news you think you need to know, forget reading EVERYTHING, you've gotta be ready to spend two to five hours every day doing just that. And that's not even including
Getting background
Arguing
Posting new info
communicating with allies
picking fights (where applicable)
Figuring out who's allied to who (more of a weekly thing)
getting told "You can't do that" for a bajillion different reasons, particularly when actually trying to do something
Getting told "you can't do that, either"
Getting your tech stuff and OOB approved by every. frickin'. minor official. in the. frickin'. universe. again. and again.
Getting your most recent moves approved (see above, and don't miss anyone or they'll get upset and find an excuse to not allow it)
Alerting all interested parties as to what you just did, and making sure they won't ignore it.
Waging war, arguing over results.
untangling politics after some guy ignores everything and blunders his entire fleet straght through yours and colonizes you.
Writing storylines
Editing storylines, because you missed a hundred quadrillion things that happened recently, 'cos you didn't spend all day reading posts, you had to write your own and do all this stuff.
Getting told "you can't do that, either. Didn't I tell you that already?"
It's a ****load of time, and considering it really doesn't accomplish anything in the slightest, it's way too much in my opinion. If you have tons of time you can't pass actually doing something, great. But it's not much fun a good deal of the time (writing OOBs is fun, at least for me. But then again, I write OOBs for Rasta colonies and all-powerful smuggling cartels, and didn't really bother to get them edited into some stock empire just like everyones and then conditionally approved), and it really starts to feel more like work than work after a while. I have not exaggerated more than two lines in the above list, and each thing can take up to an hour. A long, dull hour.
And hell will pay if you miss a day, for some reason.
