Note: I do not have any numbers for the full player base. Everything in this post is based on my personal experience with my alliance.
My alliance has been one in which new players join, build their roster, learn to play, then move on. I’m an old player but I didn’t enjoy line and other tactics… I’m too introverted and have too many other priorities for such things. (No hate on those who take extra steps to get the most benefit. It’s just not for me) I’ve never needed the extra support so I made my own quiet alliance and it naturally became what it is.
I answer questions, offer advice, do my part in boss events, etc. If anyone stop playing, I remove them and the spot is filled by another. If someone wants to continue playing but would like to seek out a more competitive alliance (or at least one more focused on established rosters) I wish them well and the spot is filled by another new player.
No recruitment, no need to search; the spot simply gets filled.
That’s no longer happening.
Almost half the spots are unfilled and have remained like that for months.
I even have one player that started last year that seemed intent on spending his way to glory… Multiple purchases a month and steady growth… They haven’t played at all in over a month.
I can’t recall this ever happening before. Occasionally a spot or two might go unfilled for a bit, but nothing like this.
I’m not saying it means anything for the game as a whole; I’m just saying what I’m seeing.
Post note: I’m not recruiting. That’s not the purpose of this post.
Once my alliance became a sort of retirement alliance, I took it public. I never have trouble filling an open spot, and in fact I can be (a little bit) picky about it!
The keys for me have been: if somebody quits, kick them. Players don’t like to join and see a lot of idle teammates. I don’t expect everybody to play every day because that’s insane, but if somebody is idle for a week and hasn’t said anything about going on vacation or having account trouble, I’ll boot them. That daily alliance ISO is really kind of important to new players, and the game shoves it in their face that they’re losing ISO because of idle teammates.
The other (related) key is to not have more than one or two open spots at a time. When you search, the game shows how many open spots the alliance has. I’ve gotten by with two before, but if you’re 19/20 I find you’re much more likely to pick up that last player quickly.
This stuff has worked for me for years now, and actually just worked last week. Maybe new players are becoming more selective, maybe there are less of them now, or maybe I’ve just been stealing all your recruits!
Unfortunately I think you’re sort of in a chicken-egg situation here. With that many open spots and idle players, it’ll be hard to get someone to join, but you need people to join to not look so empty.
Very similar experience to EB. Our alliance doesn’t have any scoring requirements, other than asking for participation in boss events, and I tend to kick if someone has been idle for more than a few days without any prior communication, but I definitely only check once or twice a week max.
Any vacant slots tend to fill back up very quickly, and the only time there were vacancies for more than a week was when I didn’t check for several weeks and then kicked 3 at the same time. So EB’s analysis is spot on.
My experience is like Blackstone; very casual public alliance with high churn - kick people after a month away - then several months ago the churn just stopped and spaces never got refilled. Me and my brother eventually jumped to a relaxed active alliance with other high roster players, and we’re happy there maxing alliance events & such.
Having an alliance with inactive or missing members will make you far less likely to attract new ones
There are fewer people playing (because, well, there are) which makes finding new players to replace old ones harder
If you’ve been in an alliance where a decent number of players are newer ones, I think it’s likely you will have more trouble than one with a decent number of still-committed vets.
For one, if your newer folks are more casual, then they will appear inactive more often which will hurt you if people are looking for a group with almost everyone, or at least a strong majority, active.
For two, I think the game in general is attracting fewer new players, which is kind of an unavoidable conclusion if you assume that throughout its history there’s always been churn happening, and a shrinking player base means both player loss and a reduction in the rate of new players.
In any case, anyone who is interested in doing well in alliance events should be able to find an alliance who would happily take them on. And the more you would ask for in terms of placement etc and if you can deliver, the same applies. Lots of openings around.
We’ve been at 19/20 filled for a few months now since I kicked a player. I wrote about this last summer after Unity got released and I kicked 3 players and was at 17/20 for a long time (other than 1 boss event where Grantosium joined to help us). Eventually around Xmas there must have been an influx of players because one day I looked and we suddenly were at 20 of 20. At that point I kicked an inactive player hoping to get 1 replacement. Have not gotten anyone since.
I definitely could kick several more players but I am worried if I go down to like 12/20 that no one will join because the alliance looks like it’s half full. There is a delicate balance between having too few players and having too many inactive ones.
Ultimately I believe there are just a lot less players joining the game because the ones I did get to go from 17 to 20 were not beginners.
I wish we knew more about how players were randomly assigned to alliances. I’d love to remove 8 or so inactive players and get 8 active ones but I don’t want to wait 8 months to get filled.
Both @KGB and @Blackstone have the same problem – too many empty spaces and/or inactive players. Why don’t you guys just take all your active players and merge?! Sounds like it’d be a win for both groups!
I wouldn’t say they are randomly assigned but if you don’t put in any search terms it’ll just show you random alliances. Anyone can search whenever you want.
It seems to heavily feature alliances that are close to full (17-19) when you just hit search and don’t click “private”. Like you’ll see 20 in a list and maybe 2 are under 17.
So if you were a random person who searched you’d probably always pick one of the ones that are close to full.
Honestly that’s smart for the devs because who wants people to see a bunch of alliances that are struggling when you go to look for one? It’d make you think the game is dying etc.
I would absolutely do this if it were possible. But there is no option as a commander to merge alliances to transfer multiple people to a new alliance.
I remember at some time they said they were going to work on alliance stuff. That was before Unity ate all the development time for new things. Even being able to see how many players might have joined and left or looked at the alliance and passed on joining would be helpful. Or a way for alliances to actively ask to be featured in the random search so the game would know you wanted players etc.
I’m sure there are many alliances that have just a few active players that would benefit from consolidating. Unfortunately, finding a way to do that is problematic for most alliances due to the difficulty of finding and communicating with other players since you have to use forums, Reddit, Discord, etc. The biggest barrier though, is that one of the alliances has to give up their alliance and possibly their commander spot to consolidate. That means they can be kicked and lose that sort of safety net they have. On the other side, if I’m the commander on the receiving alliance, I’m not giving a commander spot to anyone coming into my alliance. That means the receiving alliance doesn’t risk anything while the joining alliance assumes all the risk.
I’d take that risk over being in a dead alliance. Alliance rewards don’t matter THAT much, but at some point you can’t clear bosses anymore, and that does matter quite a bit.
Once you get caught in the sort of death spiral these guys describe, it’s almost impossible to get out of it. So yes, there’s some risk, but I’d take that risk if the alternative is me being in an alliance by myself.
If you’re working together with another Commander to help both of you make a full working alliance, why in the world would you not make them a commander as well? That seems like a huge red flag to me.
Those concerns sound like some one would have if they were never part of the larger community with their alliance. The reality of alliance mergers is far different. It’s usually friendly alliances that have already worked together in BCs and merc’ing or have player relations from similar that are intertwined that end up merging, with clear assignments and roles within the new expanded family.
It’s never just two random groups that never interacted where one just moves their players into open spots.
On the one hand, it should in theory be pretty easy to find an alliance with some small number of members that your own small alliance could merge with. But there are a few barriers:
Finding the alliance definitely would require some outside coordination. Here, or Reddit, are probably the simplest places to look (or maybe Facebook?) and find someone. You couldn’t do it in game - as I said earlier, the game will mostly show you alliances that are 17-19 members.
You would need to convince all or most of your members to shift. Even if the commanders connected via Reddit etc, you would probably be mostly communicating with members via in game chat, which as we all know, is sub-optimal at best. You would have some people who are ignoring chat in a small group, probably. People who are just playing the game casually and all that.
Thus you would probably end up leaving some behind (oh well, I guess) or driving some people away from the game completely who feel it’s a good time to quit (again, oh well?) so whoever moved would be probably some reduced number of the total when you start.
Thus…the upside/return on effort would be somewhat in question depending on your personal commitment to hitting higher targets and things like that.
If you are below 14 members or so, it’s probably a permanently declining state unless you are out there trying to recruit like crazy and luck out a bit. Your alliance will never show up to random searches as the function currently works other than if you have a cool distinctive name people might find on a random search like “Spidey’s apartment”.
But I would start with asking your members how many want to try to merge with a new group - so you have an idea of what the actual number might be - and then decide if you want to spend hours of time finding one somewhere (might take a while to even find one), then the efforts of coordinating shifting etc.
Reddit has a persistent (a new one is put up every 2 weeks) thread of people looking for alliances and since - I assume - Reddit is probably the MPQ social media space that the most players already have an account with, it might be the place to start if you decide to try to do this.