I've been back playing again following a few years away. I knew even then that things were in decline, but now I worry that the game has reached a point of no return. I've been back for only a few weeks now but alliances have just become... pointless? There is one alliance so large that there's no point in trying to join it or any other, and not a single person to whom I've sent a message asking for help, or asking about recruitment or asking for really ****ing anything at all really, has sent me so much as a "lol bugger off" in response. This totals quite a few messages to quite a few individuals and at this point I'm not certain how this game really works now.
Have we reached a point at which the inner core of players is routinely using new members as land grabs only and denying them any kind of response to any kind of message? When I used to play - and admittedly the playerbase was much larger back then - and yes, I get that this will sound kind of creepy, but there was a cameraderie amongst players and certainly I never had any issue just getting people to respond to my messages even if the answer wasn't one I'd necessarily like. If I'm having this experience then at least some completely new people may be having a similar one. Or perhaps I'm just more repellent the older I get. Also a real possibility considering the smouldering wreckage of the remainder of my existence at this point.
Anyway, I'm not sure if I should bother to play on. I'd like to be in an alliance or at least to have a few people to whom to ask questions about the game, but since I can't get a response, I don't know if I'm just too small to have in an alliance at the moment but surely if the largest alliance has 20 members, and each of the remainder has fewer than 7, maybe I might not be ENTIRELY useless at helping one of the smaller ones since they're all essentially doomed anyway, right?
Have we reached a point at which the inner core of players is routinely using new members as land grabs only and denying them any kind of response to any kind of message? When I used to play - and admittedly the playerbase was much larger back then - and yes, I get that this will sound kind of creepy, but there was a cameraderie amongst players and certainly I never had any issue just getting people to respond to my messages even if the answer wasn't one I'd necessarily like. If I'm having this experience then at least some completely new people may be having a similar one. Or perhaps I'm just more repellent the older I get. Also a real possibility considering the smouldering wreckage of the remainder of my existence at this point.
Anyway, I'm not sure if I should bother to play on. I'd like to be in an alliance or at least to have a few people to whom to ask questions about the game, but since I can't get a response, I don't know if I'm just too small to have in an alliance at the moment but surely if the largest alliance has 20 members, and each of the remainder has fewer than 7, maybe I might not be ENTIRELY useless at helping one of the smaller ones since they're all essentially doomed anyway, right?