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Unread 15 May 2010, 10:39   #57
Sun_Tzu
Arrogant Fck
 
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Posts: 1,031
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Re: Alliance player limit

At its heart, this seems to come down to a misunderstanding about how alliances work.

In essence, those arguing for lower alliance sizes seem to believe that an alliance is formed spontaneously whenever a given amount of free players exist. According to this way of thinking, an alliance is nothing but a number of players together in a tag. However, this completely disregards leadership.

The real world equivalent would be to assume that any time a number of unemployed workers existed at any given place, a new company would be formed. Granted, this disregards the need for a business idea, however a business idea is needed for a company to succeed, not for it to form. For a company to form it is required that someone leads the formation, a person who is capable of convincing others to follow.

Now, further, even if we assumed that these new alliances were to be spontaneously created, or which is more likely, that some other alliances exist ready to take these players in, we are still making an assumption about what happens when the alliance size limit is lowered.

The assumption here is that the playerbase stays constant, and that these people are intent on playing the game because of the game, not because they are encouraged to do so by others. If however the decision whether to play or not is influenced by such motivating factors as the leadership of the alliance which a person would wish to play for, it is not a given that they will even consider playing if these leaders do not recruit them, or that they would wish to be transplanted into one of these smaller alliances if they could not fit into their first choice.

As I've stated before, I believe the intrinsic motivation for playing this game is not the game itself, but the community. As such, I do not believe (and the evidence tends to suggest something similar) that reducing the alliance size limit directly moves the same amount of players from the top alliances to the smaller alliances. In fact, my belief is that very few players will make this move, and those who do make it are either using the smaller alliance for their own gain, or have made a decision to return to playing at a more communal level, in which case they likely return to a previous alliance of theirs, and the move would have happened regardless of changes in the alliance size limit.
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