I enjoyed myself but I'm retiring.
I've decided I'm done playing, but I wanted to say that I pretty much thoroughly enjoyed myself. I decided to write this message with two parts... so hopefully it can stay where it's at but if this needs to be shifted because the thread runs in a different direction than intended, then so be it.
I've written to (and received response from) the evony development staff on a key issue that for me decided whether I was going to bother sticking it out for the last two months, but I finally have to walk away. It's just too much time to devote to upkeep and while I have the time... I have other things that I could be (and probably SHOULD be) doing.
I have had a number of ideas on how to improve the game... I've shared some and kept others to myself. Aside from the obvious problem of upkeep, my big beef lately is that there is simply no means to shift an account to another server. In some small way, I understand why this is the case, but at the same time, there's really nothing more disheartening than playing on a server with some cool people only to have them leave, and you have nowhere to go yourself. Sure, you could restart on another server, but I think that I've worked awfully hard on this current account and have little interest in starting completely over from scratch. Aside from not knowing who'll stick around for any length of time, you have no idea who'll even be starting on a server. You could be in a group of jerks from the very beginning and not know it until you're a month and a few $30 packages in, really.
There's a couple of ways that players can be shifted to other servers that I believe wouldn't produce any real imbalance.
The first idea and it's one that I'd like to see happen regardless is sort of a champions league. What I envisioned was a smaller server where perhaps 100 (maybe 1000?) players would be planted onto it. The number of players would be fixed so no "new" accounts would be added to it. The map would be smaller and I think the alliance limit would also be reduced. In fact, what I think would be fun would be to set up something along the model of European soccer with a Premier League, with Second and Third Divisions. Access to this championship server would initially be through an application process but after this server got started, a new ranking system would be created to classify players based on activity, skill, and/or battle results. I had previously thought that a ranking system based on wins and losses would be pretty neat, but given the way that sieges work, a defensive win and an offensive win would have to be weighted differently. Regardless of how it's determined, this new ranking system would be seperate from honor and prestige and wouldn't be based on the same things that honor and prestige are based on. Call it 'Skill' if that makes sense... and the lower ranked players at the Premier level would be relegated to the Second Division, and so on. If someone was at the bottom of the Third Division, they risked being booted completely off the league server, and would be shifted back to their initial server.
The other idea is to allow players to shift their accounts upon a server merge. I'm currently on 136, and I would have enjoyed going to SS26 when that was created. I'm sure the evony staff have their reasons for not allowing this, or at least, for not having encouraged it in the past, but I don't see how it would imbalance anything at all to allow players to shift accounts to earlier servers. This might have the added benefit of breathing new life into these older servers too, making them more interesting to those that are already embedded there.
I've honestly enjoyed playing and think evony has created a cool game. I'm a little bummed that they aren't marketing AgeI as aggressively as they once did, and that's evident in the number of players currently on Server 144.

