FACTS:
1)When we started the game, we were deleting inactive users at 30 days. 30 days inactivity and you were off.
2)Then we introduced the ruby option which would leave your account intact if it had more than 50 rubies. Our reason was to help some players save their accounts after going inactive by some real life scenario.
3)Then we extended inactive deletion to 60 days.
4)At some point, we stopped deleting inactives.
5)We resume deleting inactives at 365 days.
6)We dropped that to 180 days and 250 max per week.
7)We deleted about 5000 accounts last week; They were all inactive. None has noticed it or at least none commented it.
8)The inactive accounts that have been vmoded are all accounts:
-Inactive for more than 180 days
-Have 50 or mor rubies.
If they had no rubies, they would be gone a long time ago now.
The reasons on why we did this, are:
-These accounts has certainly fulfilled their scenario as farm. More than they should. An everlasting farm provides no challenge. Farms should have short period of life in our thinking.
-Some of these accounts may have been artificially set up by some players in order to milk. For example, hey buddy, create a big planet there and there and there, put 50 rubies on and go inactive. Of course, such a farm cannot help 1 player eventually as more will run but if done extensively, it can easily spiral out of control.
-We reached a point, where players found it reasonable and strategic to donate 50 accounts to an account in order to use it as a farm or a fleet save option or whatever. This is something we do not find healthy.
-The base element of the game is PvP wars. If most players play against farms, it enhances the PVE aspect of the game which results in less interest for the game in long term.
-Surely, big incomes can be very entertaining at first and players think like they found eldoraldo gold, but in the longterm it does not help their immersion with the game.
Finally, some more facts:
-ZE X-TREME activity is on the rise and we have a very good base of players at some thousands points (not yet millions) who are growing in a healthy way. They need some help in order to compete with the top guns but such farms are not the optimal way. We await your suggestions. Note that the players active right now on X-TREME are the best in compare to a long time before.
-This meter has not yet been installed to other universes. We might do the same in SPEED though which has similar issues with X-TREME. Massacre is the next candidate while we have no interest to extend this to Standard. We will see.
-The total of vmoded accounts in this way were 170.
-This is not the FIRST time it happened. It has happened in LARGER scale MANY times before. It has been GREETED all the times by similar posts, threats, etc from part of the playerbase. IE
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=11350 (Dec 2013). Again, It has happened MANY times. The game is still here.
I understand X-TREME is having some issues with a certain player who has grown too far. We are ready for your suggestions on tools you want to take him down. That's a different talk though.