I know that you may not mean what you said to come across this way, but reading it as a whole seems to indicate that you're ok with other people's area getting swept, but not yours. The thing is, everyone feels that way. It is the virtual equivalent of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). When this notion of NPC clearings first came about, many people cheered, stating as you have in this thread today, that there will be more room. There was also the idea that areas would be able to be converted from "less useful" to "more useful" areas.
I really don't mean to be an "I told you so", but...(and you knew that was coming), when this first happened, I saw that Evony was absolutely intent upon this as their long-term strategy, and that accounts that have had money spent on them were going to linger, possibly indefinitely.
OK, so a "few" accounts here and there that linger are not so bad, right?
Enter the medal nerf. I know. I know. I can almost see the daggers being thrown at me for having the audacity to bring up this "totally unrelated" thing. The thing is, it's not unrelated. The medal nerf caused an increase in the number of accounts that had money spent on them. Evony cheered, and for a while, things were "good" (in quotes, because I don't agree, but I'll concede this for the sake of moving on to the next, more important part).
So, there were more accounts that had money spent on them. This meant that those accounts would linger on the map if the owners ever went inactive and they didn't do a Restart Game.
OK, so a "few" more accounts here and there that linger are not so bad, right? Not really. It had a slow-burn impact.
See, what happens is over time, since the map size is fixed, as there become more and more accounts with one city that cannot be removed, it increases the apparent "need" for doing NPC sweeps. The frequency of the sweeps first increased, followed by an increase in scope of the sweeps, then followed by another increase in frequency. NPC sweeps need to be combined with addressing the increase in cities that cannot be removed due to having money spent on them in order to be an effective solution. What the NPC sweeps are doing is slowly becoming more frequent and more invasive, because the other part of the solution is missing, thus the sweeps attempt to make up for the missing process.
Your idea of having them sweep the "less useful" NPCs won't meet the company's "needs", because over time, there will be fewer of those "less useful" NPCs, and thus the "more useful" NPCs will have to become candidates for removal.
It's all about priorities, and it does not appear that solving this issue is as high of a priority as it should be. Perhaps they are working diligently on a solution, but given my experience with converting an entire company from one point of sale to another over about the same timeframe, combined with multiple other projects, and having to provide 24x363 support, it would seem like a solution could be found, in lieu of some other things that have been done.



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