Account Sitters

I am hearing more and more about the problem of perma sitting. So I have a solution. Note: This solution is not gurantied to fix 100% of the perma sitting problems.

I think that if the account you are sitting is not logged into by the owner in 31 days, your sitting ability is removed and the 90 day countdown is started for that account. Therefore, after 121 days, including the sitting days, the account is deleted like normal unless they meet the normal restrictions and exceptions.

Please comment below what you think about why or why not this should be implemented.

Edited by Arctic55 - 27 Nov 2013 at 06:52

I agree.  Even that is too long really!  But perma-sitting MUST be eliminated!

As far as I understand, the purpose of account sitting is mainly for people who know (or sometimes don't know--e.g. some extended emergency) that they will be gone for an extended period of time not to be deleted or sieged for inactivity.

I think that is a good purpose and I have used it myself. Maybe put a time limit on it--1 year or 6 months perhaps. I know from experience that if it was less than 6 months it would mess up a lot of people, it really is possible not to have the ability to log on for half a year. If the real person does log on, the time limit could reset.


Besides cities never going away and clogging up the map, the main problem is people using accounts sittees for themselves. This could be mostly solved if account sitters had less powers. Right now account sitters can:

1. start new production queues
2. build new troops
3. settle new towns
4. send out caravans full of gold to themselves...


None of these things are needed if you are just trying to keep an account un-deleted and un-sieged while someone is gone for 6 months. I can understand reading emails to make sure there are no problems, perhaps having a building queue in the towns that do exist to make them look semi active. But if most other abilities such as the 4 above were not allowed to sitters, there would be not be many ways open to abuse.
A line has to be drawn obviously, but right now sitters are allowed to do almost everything including settling new towns, which seems rediculous to me.

More restricted sitter abilities would presumably be open to some abuse still, but combining it with a long but not-forever time limit such as 6 months would solve every problem I can think of.

As I have said in many other permasitter threads:

If you remove or cripple the sitter function, it will only encourage players to give their login and password to other players. That's a security problem. The security risk outweighs the in-game problems caused by permasitters.

Mr Damage wrote: I dont understand the continued thread after thread about sitting.

it's true nothing will come of continued threads on the subject, but it continues to be brought up because dev action on it could shift the balance of power in the game from a (relatively) few well established players/alliances to something more closely proportional to the number of players playing.  think about how the top 10 alliances might look if all sat accounts were eliminated.  is it so difficult to understand why it keeps coming up?