Bad hardware and low finances.
Hardware should mean a lot so I'm satisfied that the importance of software is decreased.
However.. Lets take a look at what happened after I completed another round of research, research that has been running for about 40 days:
Before:
Ranking User Servers Status Power
1 Donn (#5161) 4 ONLINE 301.793.832
After:
Ranking User Servers Status Power
1 Donn (#5161) 4 ONLINE 301.153.825
This has cost me 768000 HPD and 300 AP and then we're not even talking about the upgraded hardware..
Enough examples given.
I'm uncertain if everybody sees this as a problem so I would suggest discussing this first before changing anything.
My first suggestion: HPD shouldn't add power. I know somebody who has about 50 million HPD and is in the top 10, next to players who have been using their income to research softwares! Better to be inactive than to be active?
Perhaps you should also get power when you just complete research? After all, completing research isn't as easy as buying or stealing software. Not saying that the last two are easy, but saying that researching is a lot harder.
Lets have a look first at how it is calced at the moment and wait with deciding anything?