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Alliance Leadership on abandonment
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GM Stormcrow View Drop Down
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    Posted: 08 Feb 2016 at 09:38
Hi everyone,

This is a question for feedback from you guys - our awesome playerbase - because I have a rule I want to change, but am not 100% sure about the negatives of it (if there are any) and would like your feedback.

The scenario is the following:

When a player stops playing illy, there is an account abandonment procedure that will eventually remove this player's account from the game.  This usually can take up-to 90 days, depending on prestige use etc.  

However - even after 90 days - it is possible that this abandoned player's account can still remain in the game... because we do not abandon an account if it has incoming hostile units.  We check for the presence of incoming hostile units every few hours, and all it takes is for one check to fail and then we abandon the account; however if there are incoming units (and the check succeeds) then we postpone abandonment by another few hours.

On the whole, this works.  

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)?  In this case we'd probably have to insta-repatriate the incoming units; reinforcements/blockades/sieges set up etc.  It's not a small amount of work to do, and there may be a better solution - or there may be reasons why we shouldn't insta-abandon an account (though I fail to see what these could be outside farming and/or griefing)...

Any thoughts?

Best,

SC


Edited by GM Stormcrow - 08 Feb 2016 at 09:46
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Jejune View Drop Down
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To me, after the account has truly expired, it should be insta-deleted, along with all of its towns and assets. There are too many scenarios where artificially keeping these accounts alive through military operations can be exploited beyond the scope of what (I think) the game developers hope to achieve from allowing the cities to endure while military ops are underway. 

If the city disappears mid-siege, then it's a disappointment for the sieger. But them's the breaks. It's not that different from harvesting a pile of hides and skins -- often times, big kills cannot get 100% harvested in time. It's just part of the game.


Edited by Jejune - 08 Feb 2016 at 09:50

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GM Stormcrow View Drop Down
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Having talked through with TC, we think we might have a solution (at least technically, ie without the work on repatriating incoming units...)

After 90 days we stick a "long-period new player rainbow" on a city, so no new attacks can come in.  Once all incoming attacks have completed, the player account would disappear as per the rules.  Clearly, if anyone (player/sitter etc) logged into the account, the rainbow would instantly disappear.

Any objections?

SC
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Rill View Drop Down
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I think that would work, although if there is an ongoing siege, would the storm and raze or storm and capture step then bounce?

Sometimes people use a "holding siege" to maintain such an account (such as for future siege).  Would this mean after a period of time holding sieges would no longer work?  And if so, how would the player know?
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GM Stormcrow View Drop Down
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Originally posted by Rill Rill wrote:

I think that would work, although if there is an ongoing siege, would the storm and raze or storm and capture step then bounce?
It's a good edge case, and we'll test it first before releasing the code so we know what happens.  At this point in time I have no idea what would happen :)

Originally posted by Rill Rill wrote:

Sometimes people use a "holding siege" to maintain such an account (such as for future siege).  Would this mean after a period of time holding sieges would no longer work?  And if so, how would the player know?
Not 100% sure on what a 'holding siege' is, but guess you mean it's a siege that is in place but chooses not to 'storm'?  In which case, after the max siege day requirement it'd head home automatically (and no one else being able to send any new sieges due to the rainbow protection) then it'd just be a way of extending the timer before ultimate abandonment.

SC
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Artefore View Drop Down
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I think that sieges should keep the player in the game as long as the siege has building de-leveling engines in it.  Seems a bit unfair to have cities disappear from under a siege, imo.  "Place-holding" sieges or blockades shouldn't affect disappearance though.  
"don't quote me on that" -Artefore
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Originally posted by GM Stormcrow GM Stormcrow wrote:

Not 100% sure on what a 'holding siege' is, but guess you mean it's a siege that is in place but chooses not to 'storm'?  In which case, after the max siege day requirement it'd head home automatically (and no one else being able to send any new sieges due to the rainbow protection) then it'd just be a way of extending the timer before ultimate abandonment.

A holding siege is a siege that has no siege engines in it, so it sits outside the city and does nothing until its timer is up.  Commonly used to hold inactive cities for people to prevent others from thinking the city is open for capturing and to prevent disappearance.
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Carbonara View Drop Down
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Does it have to be a rainbow?
I vote for a rain cloud, with a tiny lightning bolt for dramatic effect. Beer
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I'm not the best at wording these things, but i'll try..

1.  Alliances will sometimes hold out for as long as they can in the hope that their alliance friend will return to the game (a player may leave unexpectedly because of RL problems).

2.  For new players, the fastest way to grow is through siege capture rather than settling cities.
A new player, while having the ability to send a holding siege(/capturing army), will usually require the help of their alliance to (a) clear the city of any defensive troops, and (b) lower the population with catapults.

The problem is, catapults and clearing armies are not always available, especially when the city being sieged is a long way away from the alliance hub (the intention may be to capture it and exodus it closer to the alliance).
So occasionally it may be necessary to wait longer than the maximum siege time of 14 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes for help to arrive, and the player might have to send another holding army to give them more time.
Catapults also move very slowly, which compounds the problem.


So between waiting for an alliance member to return (they sometimes do), finding someone to siege their cities once it has become clear that they aren't coming back (most players would rather see a 30k city sieged by someone from their alliance rather than see it disappear from the map without anyone benefiting), and waiting for help to arrive (eg. if a player based in Elgea wants to siege a city in BL)... there's kind of a balancing act.

In addition to this, there are also alliances who sell abandoned cities (to players from outside of the alliance).

I can just see alot of people being upset if any of this was changed all of a sudden without at least considering how it would affect everyone.

I kind of like the way things are now, but I can see the other side of the coin too. Not wanting people to exploit the game, and rules are rules (90 days is plenty of time, etc)

If there is a problem with an Alliance waiting for their leader to return, I don't know how else you could address it though.

I Hope this was helpful to at least someone. lol
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Angrim View Drop Down
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i wonder if a change is necessary. GM Stormcrow came to the forum with a concern about alliance leadership being stuck in a hopeless limbo. Jejune has effectively moved the conversation to how more reliably to purge older accounts. the reality of holding sieges is that they demand more from players (assuming they have to be reestablished every 14d and that there's no exploit being used) than simply getting someone to log into the account every 90d. so to Jejune's point, closing this loophole in the purge rules (which is really just using the game mechanics, no worse than terraforming) is only likely to have an effect on those players who are not prepared to persuade a departing player to return to reset the count...or worse, to convince them to yield up a password so someone else can.

regarding GM Stormcrow's original, much narrower case, i wonder if this happens much. the times i can recall when a significant alliance went leaderless are all related to dev action. in those cases, it seems the devs could just as easily demote the account while they're suspending it. (perhaps this is more difficult than i imagine...?) if that's not desirable, then why not simply demote alliance leaders when the purge is first triggered (the time GM Stormcrow has proposed for affixing the rainbow)?

all in all, these cities are assets on the board and a player is expressing an interest in them by repeatedly deploying a holding siege; if that interest wanes, the cities are immediately purged. the player has no ability to direct the assets of the account, as was the case with perpetual sitting. is this really a problem that needs dev action to resolve?
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