[K-W]

I agree pretty much on all accounts.

I am against trying to balance or isolate the different game objectives, RE: Rob's suggestion. I would like to see alliance rankings dropped from the game entirely. I don't think the race to see who can tag the highest score from an arbitrary number of members is interesting and the games attempts to balance the alliance game through rules and enforcement have been intrusive and ineffective. People have to literally dedicate themselves to not winning in order to make the alliance game competitive and when the alliance game stagnates the entire game stagnates. Meanwhile as jer says you've got unmotivated members unwilling to step up and take charge or take on the kind of work it takes to run a team of that size effectively. Alliances have always relied on a small group of people to do a ton of work and that required a pool of motivated players to draw from. As that pool has dried the situation of a few players being expected to do all the work has become farcical in many places.

I disagree that this is a sign that alliances should be bigger so that this small group can be exploited by largest possible unhelpful mass of members. That will just overwork them more and further shrink the pool of people willing to work. Making things smaller holds out the promise of reducing the workload to the point where people might be willing to step up and help out.

Everything that I see tells me that people want to work mainly in smaller groups where work can be shared more effectively while being much freer to associate with other people. Let's make the galaxy game more competitive and interesting and let people freely associate around that and the planet rankings instead of continuing to prop up an artificial alliance setup that was never supposed to be official in the first place and formed to support planet/gal players rounds and rounds ago when the game was quite different.