Alliance Leadership on abandonment

GM Stormcrow wrote: However, when the abandoned account is (eg) the leader of an alliance - and the rest of the alliance are waiting on the account to be actually removed from the game - it is possible for people to keep the clock ticking over for ever (intentionally or accidentally), so that the alliance leadership role never gets passed down the tree. My question is... should we remove an abandoned account from the game after 90 days of inactivity (regardless of whether troops are incoming or not)?

I believe this must be a fairly rare scenario. Quite the opposite, if there is only one leader in the alliance and that person goes inactive even for 2 weeks, that cripples the entire alliance. I could see how people would want to keep the account around to cannibalize the cities and/or maybe hope that the person would eventually come back, but leaving that person in the leadership role would be highly undesirable for an active alliance that needs to recruit members, handle diplomacy and all sorts of other alliance matters.

I would suggest that for that scenario, after 2-3 weeks of inactivity super-user rights should be passed to the next rank down and the role itself automatically demoted below that next rank.

However, this is an entirely separate issue from people holding sieges on cities of accounts that are past 90 days of inactivity. Personally, I am quite ambivalent about that. On the one hand, this is artificially prolonging the life of dead accounts and big alliances get a huge edge over small ones as they tend to have more of these accounts and can feed their members cities necessary for growth. Any person experienced in playing Illyriad does not settle every city but sieges old cities that have complete research.

On the other hand, wiping out these accounts would further cut the stock of cities available for capturing for everyone, which would again disadvantage small alliances more as the big ones would have an easier time to compete for the remaining cities. Ultimately, this hurts new players and small new alliances the most. For players who want to do things in the game besides building cities, the pace of founding/developing new cities is crippling.

Looking at http://www.puzzleslogic.com/illy/, the stats show that there are currently 2197 players with 1-2 cities, which is 42.5% of Illyriad. The number of players with a higher city count declines fast, and by the time we get to 10 cities there are only 183 players (of course now that the city limit is higher there are more people with 10+ cities, but still it is a 10x decilne). It is well known, although I do not have the data to support this, that many players do not stick around in Illyriad for long, exactly because of the slowness of growth and research. They lose interest around the 2nd city, and the numbers above seem to corroborate this. In my opinion, if Illyriad were to attract and keep more players in the game, the more options for these players to grow, reach at least a 6-city count, and become competitive, the better. Cutting back on the pool of old cities does not really contribute to that end - if anything it does the opposite.

I have another vote for the simplest possible solution of passing on Alliance leadership after a period of inactivity on the part of the Alliance Leader.

Having multiple super-users works well for many alliances -- Crows have a tradition of having multiple Rooks.  But I don't think the developers want to be in the business of dictating how people run their alliances.  They have created the role system to allow for the most possible freedom in doing so.  I admire the depth of their sandboxy thinking in this regard, even if it does make their lives (and sometimes ours) more complicated.

The game mechanics are fine, Human ego is the problem.

These proposals seem like a lot of work for something that happens very infrequently. I think it's a straightforward rule to say that if an alliance leader is inactive for 90 days that the next level of alliance ranks receives full executive functions. Perhaps the term of inactivity should be something that the leader sets at the alliance creation, and can change by editing the alliance or ranks.

How an alliance elects a new leader also seems completely separate to the emergency transition of control functions due to prolonged leader inactivity.