Remove Ghost Alliances

[Alan]

So what's a Ghost Alliance? 

Ghost Alliance - Alliances that are unavailable to see on the alliance page due to their member(s) being in vacation mode.

As of this request there are currently 88 Ghost Alliances. Alex has said that after a period of time people are removed from the game due to blatant inactivity. While some people in these Ghost Alliances have been active in the past 2 months that's only a handful of people. Some of these players haven't been seen in 6 months to a year and even beyond that.

Proposal - Take the current alliance bank and send it to the "leader" of the alliance. Then delete the alliance. What this does is:

• Stops the padding of the alliance rank percentile
• Opens up Alliance names for people to use
• (99% sure) Reduces server resources in updating alliance stats.

Here are examples of a Ghost Alliance:
https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=7066
https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=4568
https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=5267
https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=7588
 

[Deborah Kobayashi]

I oppose this proposal, if an alliance VM'ed they did it with either the intent or belief that they may one day return. if they dont return to maintain their VM then they will end up deleted along with the alliance. 

If you have a problem with term of length at which they can VM without renewing, then propose a change to max VM time.

[Alan]

44 minutes ago, Deborah Kobayashi said:

I oppose this proposal, if an alliance VM'ed they did it with either the intent or belief that they may one day return. if they dont return to maintain their VM then they will end up deleted along with the alliance. 

If you have a problem with term of length at which they can VM without renewing, then propose a change to max VM time.

So opposed you downvoted it twice. https://gyazo.com/a7286e5837a42fc9c5a17d3da724b86d

Here's the deal. Most of these people aren't coming back. We know that. Some of these are people that played for 1 day and have been going in and out of automatic VM for a while now. Shaving down the 50 alliances where it's obvious the alliance was left in the hand of a day player because the owners didn't know how to delete the alliance seems like a common maintenance check that should be occurring but isn't.

Please look at "Pirates" - https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=7588

An alliance of 2 multis that they created their nation, created the alliance then stopped playing. Literally 1 day of play and they stopped. These are not people that have been in an alliance for 2 years and are militarily deployed or on vacation. This stuff is blatant and needs to be cut down. 

[Deborah Kobayashi]

While some of those are obviously deletable, having the admins go through and evaluate each is just giving them another workload to do that seems kinda pointless.

Instead lets address the issues they cause that you have a problem with.

 

1. The alliance rank precentile can be solved by hiding ghosts from the formulas.

2. Alliance name is the main reason most of them VM'ed, however a system where you could request the release of a name from a dead alliance, to be evaluated by alex, based on the name itself (IE is this an original creation, a common theme, or a generic name) and the longevity & history of that alliance in PW.

Would also be nice to be able to do that on the nations that quit below 100 score, yet still have to wait half a year to release their names depsite never really playing

 

It just seems like alot of work to decide who is and who isnt, you're also making assumptions about the caretakers, not realizing maybe the alliance leader is still around in another alliance, and had a friend or member hold their name until they can rebuild their alliance etc.

(The leader of united maharlika empire, an alliance you listed, is currently head of FA in Archangels, and intends to restore his alliance one day)

 

 

If we got rid of ghost alliances in 2018, taith (DUAT) and spanish armada wouldnt be here today since they were both VMed for over 6 months

Edited October 9, 2020 by Deborah Kobayashi

[Dr Rush]

If you politely request it alex will already release names being held by dead alliances/nations on a case by case. As for processing power, the only power that  should be being used used is a couple extra 0.001 ms on a database call once a day while global stats are called. Unless ofc someones goes and deliberately searches these alliances out triggering an update of their db entry. I can see counting towards stats being an issue if in fact they do so to be an issue but thats better fixed by just not counting them. I'd point out the game doesn't even check for truly dead alliances with 0 members at all. Such alliances get deleted when someone checks their page. Adding a completely new check for the purposed edge case is actually rather expensive on processing time for no benefit.