Limitations to Substitution

I'm pretty sure they didn't. The substitution message always said no more the 50% of the time on the world was allowed, but their coding was wrong and it was never implemented, until now on new worlds.

30 days at time also seems reasonable.

The problem many have is with the concept of changing the 'rules' (or implementing them) after such a long time. Where it is a bug fix then, I agree, it should be implemented on all worlds. Where it is a modification such as when they introduced malus and the forgotten attacks they rightly decided not to patch existing worlds with these changes. (It could have been done for technical reasons but it doesn't matter why they didn't implement the changes on old worlds.)

"gamerdruid;c-2049667" wrote:
...Some would argue that these worlds should be closed, but for whatever reason, EA/Envision don't publicly support the closure of a world (that's why the Vet servers continue after the end of their season)....

Financial suicide, one would have to be the greatest moron in the business world for denying free cash flow. As a shareholder/stakeholder, I would be demanding the head of said moron on a platter. The server is being supported by "active worlds", all inactive worlds are pure gravy. One of my "inactive worlds" provides $500-$1000 USD / month.

Maybe - but not many worlds are that 'inactive' - some of those I'm on can't must 50 in the overall roster anymore, let alone in one alliance.

They obviously way up the cost of maintaining and managing old worlds (in general) versus their loss of income and at present the income wins.

They're not pure gravy because there is a cost of developing patches that work on so many different variations of worlds and testing them for each type as fully as they can. We know from bitter experience that they don't manage to always get patches right, even for new worlds.

"YulsEast;c-2050587" wrote:
Well one reason to limit substitution is that clearly the game developers were not thinking that these "vacation substitutions" could last for years on end. In my world, which is 5.5 years old, I know subs that have been in control by one person for probably 4 of those years. He's actually got 5 alts and 15 subs, which he uses to go around and take POIs by influence. He thinks that it's great that you have to waste resources to go blast him off the POIs, which he doesn't care, because they are just subs so he just respawns and does it again. Not sure if that's what the game developers envisioned for this function.

I think there is no question that they did not intend for this to work like that, the 30 day warning has been in place since the games very early days it just never worked.

Well, maybe someone from administration is reading this and would consider turning it on in older worlds. I don't buy the argument -- either here or in real life -- that it should stay screwed up because it's always been screwed up.

Here is the argument for the way it is currently, I personally don't care either way. What if someone has invested years in taking care of an account only to have the rules changed on you to solve a problem that doesn't really exist much in the older worlds?

You probably would not be happy. Also, as I mentioned, these changes are primarily designed to stop people from abusing multi's which is primarily an early server issue. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying you can't abuse it in an older server I'm simply saying the issue the development team is responding to is primarily coming out of newer servers not older ones hence not making this a backwards change.

Anyway, we shall see where it goes, if people like it and if there is a clamor to turn it on for older worlds I'm sure they will consider it.