Your choices are:
a) very
b) totally
c) completely
Seriously - the Alliance Recruitment chat is a complete jungle. It must be 50-1 recruiters to lookers, then throw in all the mercs that just hang out there due to boredom. The message boards here see very little action, since almost anyone that will go out of their way to visit a message board is likely in an established alliance already. There is a small spot on Reddit that doesnāt see any action, and there is the Line group which is all recruiters and no lookers.
I have resorted to taking my alt account and just randomly searching a word in the alliance search. I find an alliance with just a couple of people and then jump in there and give them a pitch. This works about as well as the AR Chat. The biggest attraction for 7D and the other alliance groups is not all the knowledge you gain, but the fact that you donāt have to recruit. I inherited an alliance by surprise last week and I have spent far more time trying to fill it back up than I have actually playing the game. I am dangerously close to just giving up and leaving everyone to fend for themselves. The number of alliances with a couple active people and a bunch of dead accounts is staggering. In my opinion, this is the very worst part of the game. There must be something SG can do to inform people they can find an alliance that fits their level, and there has to be a better system than waiting in the AR chat then pouncing on the one person an hour that shows up looking. I donāt know what those things are, but anything would be better than this.
@Petri - this is a serious issue, and everyone that frequents the AR Chat (or tries elsewhere) is aware of it.
Geezā¦ I stopped playing some time back (several weeks) and this was a real headache back then. They STILL havenāt fixed it?!?
And the sad thing is that the recommended alliance feature USED TO work fine! We would get several people dropping in per day sometimes when we had a couple of open slots. Many would leave again, but some would choose to stay. Then after one of the game āupgradesā it all changed and was rubbish from there. At that point we had to start actively recruitingā¦ using all the channels you mentioned. A real headache!
(I will admit some of the best / most active members we got in Aleph Null were those recruited from the Forumsā¦ because then you are actually getting people who are interested enough to research the game and visit the boardsā¦ but often only after a good week or 2 of campaigning.)
Really is dissappointing to see they havenāt fixed thisā¦ and itās really not that hard to fix. Just takes some interest.
Ah wellā¦ as ex player Iām not qualified to comment. Just count as a bitter lurkerā¦ (who is still interested in checking back once in a while). When/if I see such basic issues actually getting fixed and the game moving forward, I may dip back in for a while.
That one change was made when I was rather new and in my first alliance. I remember people popping in all the time, but now nothing. I have had no one show up in months that I did not actively go and find somewhere. Now that Iām a leader, I am starting to get insanely frustrated when I have several open spots.
Also, I would be remiss if I didnāt invite you to join us if you return to the game @Little_Infinity. Itās āSovereign Speakeasyā
Just go on the Line app alliance recruitment room. Yes, there are more recruiters than people looking for alliances, but itās much slower paced than the crazy AR in game.
I really hate to say it, but it has become worseā¦ random search of alliances turns up a majority of alliances with less than 10 members - most of them have 3 - and the majority of those are full of dead accounts, people that havenāt played in months.
AR chat is full of people chatting - what else to do, when there is no one there looking for an alliance? But they chat to such an extent, that anyone going there is going to feel as if they are intruding.
I agree that SG needs to point more newbies towards the forum - most of them donāt even find the AR chatroom. It would go a long way to helping new players if SG would inform new players that they can find advice and help how to play and advance in the game in the forum. And please fix the alliance search function. It is more broken than ever. @Petri
I found my alliance using the search (when it was giving useful results). I bring new members now from alliance recruitment chat which is filled with spam and MANY unnecessary side talks.
The best way that really helped me finding recruits is by blocking the side-talkers. I am able to find people who ask for alliance. It is still frustrating sometimes but better than nothing
I agree that there should be a better way to find alliances and the chat in general needs to be improved.
Unfortunately you can only be invited by people already in the groups. Perhaps ask any friends or clan members if anyone is already in the recruitment or merc channels
For me the issue is lack of categories in AR. Recruiters should be able to categorize if they are top alliance vs. beginners/training, war participating or not, more casual vs. more active, etc. The new recruits could check the boxes of the type of alliance they are looking for.
And something really needs to be done about the dead or nearly dead alliances. When I was looking for an alliance it was overwhelming how many leaderless or alliances with multiple inactive players I had to wade through.
I see it as a two-fold problem, and I think SG can improve both of them in different ways. (Without simply deleting the alliances from the game since somebody did pay gems to create it, and might come back later. It is only fair to them to leave them a way to re-activate.)
Dead/Dormant alliances clutter up the list/search. Alliances with NO active members. SG forces major version updates ~monthly. If you load the game with an older version, you cannot play until you update. Iām 97% sure that you cannot be raided when your account hasnāt been updated up to the forced update level. All SG has to do is flag an alliance as dormant if all its members are dormant this way. Then maybe make dormant alliances hidden from search by default. (And if it is open, and an unlucky and clueless newbie joins, it moves to the worse category)
Zombie alliances with inactive leaders are a trap for new players who donāt know any better. (Our alliance just got one who took six months to realize it was time to give up on them). SG could auto-promote players to at least co-leader, when the leader and all the co-leaders are inactive. At least then somebody can change alliance settings, either making it easier to recruit new membersā¦or turning it into a dormant one by making it invite-only, or raising the cup level to something impossible, then kicking all the active members, so it no longer can suck in newbies who randomly search and think the name sounds cool without knowing to look for things like an active leader.
My proposed solutions leave the alliance intact, should a dormant alliance owner return to the game and want to re-start. Other more draconian options are possible, but these two would be a good start!
@Petri, can we please get an official explanation as to why this was changed and why it hasnāt been restored? This is the number one problem with the game at this time without question.
To build off of what you saidā¦ Why not have an alliance be automatically be declared inactive after the leader (NOT co-leader) is inactive for a month with automated messages that populate once per day informing any remaining active members. Inactive alliances are automatically excluded from wars, searches, refresh lists, and maybe even titans. Only the leader can uncheck the inactive box to make it active again. An alliance could also be flagged inactive by players that needs to be approved by EP staff.
Good chance this is a clueless question of a non-Line user, butā¦ Iām curious, how are potential recruits going to drop by the recruiting group if it is invite only?
Nope, I wasnāt suggesting forcing you folks out; your alliance is functioning as it is, presumably pretty well! Newbies donāt need to be āprotectedā from joining you, etc.
Of course, it would be better off if the leader abdicated and could be kicked. And you yourself say you would like to migrate everybody to someplace new to accomplish this. (But probably havenāt 'cuz it is really easy to lose people in that process, especially if you arenāt connected on Line, or some other chat client.)
If you do migrate, as a public service, have the last active player to leave be a co-leader who can make sure that the alliance is set up as invite-only and unable to snare ignorant newbies (with nobody active to click āacceptā)ā¦and most likely kick any inactive members/elders as cleanup; thereās nothing you can do about the inactive leader and any inactive co-leads.
I doubt SG is going to do something like this, @JonahTheBard, but ideal for you would be to give an active co-lead the option of splitting an alliance with an inactive leader, effectively creating a new alliance (presumably paying the normal gem cost) and forcing all the players to choose which alliance they want to be in after the split.
FYI, Allowing this kind of thing with an active leader sounds like a nasty piece of work; poaching half the members is gonna ā ā ā ā people off!
The other option would be some sort of lead/co-lead auto-promotion or swap, but thatās also tricky, given that the original leader did pay gems to create an alliance, and presumably the first thing you will do after becoming leader is demote & kick the old lead due to inactivity!
It is certainly a fraught process and we are allocating significant brain power to executing the plan.
A co-leader will be leaving their alt account in the original alliance for a while to mop up stragglers and we will leave directions in the alliance header.
We have given the leader a week to sign over the alliance. Then we plan a two week climatise period for about half the members who arenāt on Line.
I had the good luck to start with a brand new alliance when I first started looking, and it has been great, and somehow or other I ended up as a co-leader; still dunno how I got suckered into that kind of work !
Relevant to you, @JonahTheBard is that this alliance started with ~10 who fled a former alliance. And one issue with starting a new allianceāyour titan score starts at zero, and loot from 1* titans is crap. It will take at least a couple weeks to get up to bigger titans.
If 1-2 members leave first and start something new, they can probably kill the first few 1* titans on their own, and maybe need another member or two when they get up to 2* or 3* titans. Doing this while youāre giving the leader time to sign over the alliance will make for better titan killing when the member show up; it isnāt much fun telling people āOnly hit the titan once so you donāt kill it before everybody gets a shot at it.ā
