Let me try to spell it out for you again.
The leader created the alliance.
He/she used his gems to do so.
The alliance belongs to him.
Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is stealing.
Stealing is wrong.
To summarize:
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Some people do not want the leader to lose his/her gems, which were used to set up the alliance. Simply demoting or removing the leader or abandoning the alliance are no solutions then.
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Some people do not want the effort of the leader/alliance to be lost, so leaving and starting over (+gem payment) is not a solution then.
So what solution fits both points?
A solution which ensures that:
- The leader does not lose his/her gems.
- The alliance it’s progress is saved.
What if after a certain period of time the Leader goes into ‘‘spectator mode’’ and the oldest Co-Leader gets promoted to Leader, with the same rights as the previous Leader?
If this Co-Leader does not except it within a certain period of time, the 2nd oldest Co-Leader receives the same popup message. They can of course pass it on to someone else.
- Spectator Leader has no influence on the alliance in any way (trophy count etc)
- A 31th spot becomes available for a new member
Then once the Spectator Leader returns, he/she is able to demote the new Leader back to Co-Leader or promote the new Leader to actual Leader. In control over losing/keeping your gems.
Two downsides:
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It is no solution if (all) the Co-Leader(s) are inactive also. It is possible to let the popup message of promoting a new Leader reach to ‘‘Elders’’ also. But then, I would suggest leaving the alliance due to alliance inactivity anyway.
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To bring back the balance between alliances after the Spectator Leader has returned, it will be necessary to remove the 31th spot by kicking a player from your alliance (or else the newest member will be removed).
I do think it is debatable wether or not to remove an inactive leader after a certain period. I understand the ‘‘stealing is wrong’’ statement. I also agree with it.
But, I also agree that it would be beneficial for the alliance if an inactive leader will be removed after (for example) 1 year of inactivity. The downside of having to kick someone to go back to 30 members will then automatically be countered.
We can ask ourselves…
What is an ethical action after a while in this situation?
That is an imaginative and clever solution. I have some misgivings about it, but I’m not even going to set them out.
I simply do not accept the underlying premise: that we need to invent a new way for alliance members to get rid of inactive leadership. We already have a way: members can leave and form a new alliance. No one has explained to me yet what is stopping active alliance members from doing this simple, easy thing. I suspect nothing is stopping them.
Do we need to worry about saving an alliance’s “progress”? Not really. Most alliance stats are rate measures, not cumulative measures - a new alliance with the same active players as the old one will have a similar alliance score (less the trophies of the inactive players) and be fighting the same level Titans within a week or two. There is no downside.
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I feel also very comfortable with agreeing that leaving the alliance and creating a new alliance does not have any downsides. At least, no downward trends major enough to consider them as real downsides. 
Obviously not everyone agrees with that. I always like to join them in thinking about a more suitable (for them) solution. One reply gave 3 possible answers to the question ‘‘what is stopping active alliance members from leaving and forming a new allaince?’’ already:
I add to it:
- The fear of losing members during the process of creating a new alliance. In other words; being off ‘‘worse’’ for an unknown period of time.
- Not willing to put in any effort. A personal issue; lazyness.
The lack of knowledge (and perhaps courage) to initiate and execute the process of creating a new alliance succesfully is probably the most important reason, since it also includes the fear of losing members. Luckily our brand new moderator @JonahTheBard wrote an excellent thread about this and has mentioned it already in this thread.
People who do not visit this forum might feel more confident once they receive some kind of in-game assistence. This should be sufficient to motivate them enough:
Anyway, I do not need the system to be changed so that it works for me. It does already. But simple implementations as @NPNKY suggested wouldn’t hurt anyone really. However…
I think it is completely ethical when the rank of an inactive leader will be downgraded after a period of inactivity. I also think it is ethical to completely remove the ex-leader after a longer while of inactivity. But only if this is described publicly, such as in terms of conditions, guidlines or policies. AND also if this counts for any other type of member. Equality is important.
A true inactive leader will not notice any loss, ever. And if after a long period of time he/she decides to return, then having lost 50 gems is very acceptable in my opinion. A consequence of letting down (with or without purpose) your alliance members.
If I don’t show up at my soccer trainings, I will not be given a chance to play in our matches in general. Or I will have to pass on the captain’s belt to someone else. Even after I pay a month or yearly membership fee. It’s ethical to me, because in contrast to me… my team does show commitment.
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That’s a very thoughtful and balanced reply @TomV93.
I think the problem is reasonably low priority, partly because so many players seem to be content and oblivious to the situation and the potential of an active alliance.
I can definitely see @Brobb s point that leaders pay gems and so have the right to their alliance.
That said, I would be open to the idea of making it easier to port all active members to a clone alliance if the leader is long-term inactive.
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I don’t think it is ethically sound to demote a leader for inactivity, but you have made a very good case for it. If it were clear in the T&Cs that this would happen then I still wouldn’t be pleased (I think being inactive is a leader’s prerogative) but I could live with it.
You’ve set out very clearly the possible barriers to members forming a new alliance - they seem mostly to be knowledge, motivation, organisation and the 50 gem cost. Those do not seem very significant to me, but I definitely agree with you that @NPNKY’s suggestions are good ones, and a few simple messages might go a long way towards mitigating some of these problems.
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Yes, and if you spend time fixing things that aren’t really broken for 99.9% of the players then you are wasting dev resources. I can spend a lot of time refining something that works and not innovating, but if we did that then we would have the best fire pits in the world, but no stoves. See I can make silly and non applicable analogies too.
One thing I find interesting about this thread. People have been in this forum demanding retribution for various items and a common response is “its only 300 gems or a couple bucks” or similar. Now we have many people arguing that the mere 50 gems is so valuable that we cannot promote different alternatives for dead alliances or live alliances with inactive leadership.
I don’t see people sweating one way or the other. Seems like people have an opinion on this one and they are firm. That’s life, we all have different opinions. I personally don’t see an issue with demoting an inactive leader - I’ve seen it done successfully in other games. Just my thoughts.
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Best way is… remove all inactive leadership alliance.
Then active members find… new alliance… … 
I’m the leader of an alliance and I don’t earn the alliance. If I let my people down, take another 50 gems from me and give one of those good people the leadership. If you feel bad about it, give me 50 gems to have a good feeling. Some people love their alliance and don’t want to found a new one. that should be respected. When Anchor is out of the game/inactive, I’m sure that a lot of people were really sad about 7DD dying. When a leader is out and the next one gets his chance to become leader, he could spend 50 gems for the old leader. I think there are a lot of good options without stealing or betraying anybody.
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I am sure this is true - but I am not sure it applies to the many alliances with 3 randomly active players and many inactive players that have not logged into the game for months… there are many of those. They are most likely dead accounts. Some people don’t stick with the game. Those that are really active and want to get ahead, will likely at some point change alliances, as they will realize they aren’t getting ahead in an alliance made up of mostly inactive players.
All in all, I don’t think this is a big priority for SG - maybe at some time in the future, ridding their servers of inactive accounts will be an issue. But certainly not worth it at the moment to spend time and resources to create methods of demoting and promoting…
But a simple ingame message to those in alliances, whose leader has been inactive for a certain amount of time, should not be difficult to implement and might help some players.
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But that’s where we disagree.
À player owns his account.
It’s linked to the Google play or the Apple Store account.
He can’t trade his heroes, resources and so on.
There are lots of things about it in général conditions of the game.
But I disagree when you say that a leader owns the alliance.
This is like creating a chess club in your Town.
You have to declare it in préfecture, probably pay for this (the 50 gems here), you Will be probably the first president of this club (here the leader), but it does not belong to you.
Maybe you can pass the presidence to another member, you can leave the club and it will continue without you if there are some active members.
Same for alliance for me. You try to build a club with guys sharing same passions, same points of view, but that’ s not your private property.
Read the general conditions and find some where that you own the alliance ?!
No private property : no theft.
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Silly answer.
Dev do not only fix broken features.
Do we need to buy new avatars, background for avatars, pins ?
99,9% don’t care.
Do we need the raid shield ?
99,9% don’t care.
Do we need to rename teams ?
99,9% don’t care.
Is it bad for dev to do it ?
No. That’s called minor improvement…
But stay in your cave, Neandertal, and keep the minor improvements away…
Some players will love minor changes, while others will think those are irrelevant and are not improving anything. Different opinions matter and are allowed. That’s why I would just respect the ones which differ from yours at any given time.
Some of those minor improvements, such as the option to see how many flags your alliance still has available during alliance wars, naming teams, extra team-slots and raid shields were actually requested by ‘‘us’’. Any minor improvement, especially requested by us, is a quick-win and should give you the feeling SGG does care about the feedback we deliver to them.
I think we should at all times be satisfied when SG implements these quick-wins for us. I also don’t think that the time they devote to these quick-wins will have much influence on the implementation date of projects with major improvement aspects.
So let’s get back to the inactive leadership topic. Let’s also assume that SG would like to assist those who are in need of another solution.
The right question. Anyone has ideas on how they could do this?
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Maybe an option button and a popup message for all alliance members which only appears after the leader has been inactive for too long, which, after giving all the players a week or so to decide whether to stay or go, creates a new alliance and transfers all the players who chose to take the option to the new one en mass?
The old alliance should be set to ‘Invite Only’ at that point.
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That’s a very good option. The founder keeps the alliance they paid for (more like a privately owned company than a chess club, I’d argue), while active members get the opportunity to form a new alliance together, without the myriad challenges of doing it themselves (
).
I don’t see a downside to this.
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Agree Avatars are silly, but people buy them and like and that helps SG bottom line, so I get it.
Both the other ones have had a number of people requesting them over a long period of time. And guess what - extra slots and shield is revenue for SG. Also - there is no simple work around for what they are trying to improve.
Granted I would rather have them actually fix major things like war matching than any of the above.
But for this improvement there is an easy work around.
So as most people who slot priority for improvements knows…low impact, easy work around, no or low revenue = don’t even bother.
Imo, the simple solution to the inactive leader problem should be as follows:
If a leader has been inactive for 30+ days, then if:
A) There is at least one Co-Leader, then any Co-Leader may assume leadership for 50 gems.
B) There is at least one Elder, but no Co-Leaders, then any Elder may assume leadership for 50 gems.
C) There are no Co-Leaders or Elders, then any Member may assume leadership for 50 gems.
Regardless of who takes over as Leader, the 50 gems will in turn be reimbursed to the previous Leader. This seems simple and fair enough to me.
You didn’t understand my question
No, I understood… The system wouldn’t allow me to start a new topic (although I think it will now), so posting my idea as a Reply comment on a thread that is at least related was all I could see to do.
That said, I think my idea of letting other members of an Alliance step in to fill the leadership void would be a better way of solving the problem of inactive leadership. Not only would this be more fair to the folks stuck w/out a Leader than just booting their Alliance altogether, but it would also slow the ever-expanding # of Alliances, since players wouldn’t be continually having to leave those w/ inactive leadership to form new ones.