Minimum admission requirements

[intchanter]

The various application threads have seen recurring mention of desire for set standards for new member admission.

Should there be a minimum average fleet strength, a requirement that the largest fleet meet certain specs?

What sort of information in an application should lead to immediate rejection?

What other kinds of standards would we like to see?

[2kcastle]

Personally i'm against minimum troops and fleet counts for people to apply. but i do think its important that we judge all applicants by a similar set of criteria.
If anything i'd say we should ask for all applicants to have a minimum number of isles, it is much less likely that someone will decide to quit the game once they have started expanding their empire.

[bishop]

I'm with 2k on this one. I don't think a fixed set of requirements would be particularly useful to us at the moment. We already ask for fleet details — we can decide on an individual basis whether they know what they're doing.

To be honest, when I see arbitrary lists of requirements on alliance pages like [IIR], I cringe at how poorly they understand the game. It's still possible for new players to get on their feet, we have several in FoM — asking them whether they have 24 catapults yet doesn't tell you anything about them.

[Arminius]

They wouldn't be as precise as '24 cats'. More like: has a few isles, an appropriate number of spears and ships on each isle, etc. Fairly general and vague, but just to give us a reason to rule out someone who's got 10 isles and 50 stoners as defence on each of them.

[intchanter]

Then perhaps what we could use are some examples as a reference for what inadequate, questionable, sufficient, strong, and excessive defenses look like?

I'd like to see such examples simply so that I can stay firmly in the fourth category.

[Haymaker]

If you think about strength requirements, it's fairer, and more accurate, to employ averages instead of saying "you must have x spear fighters and y large warships". A colo Puttana! with 100 isles might have 10,000 large warships while a player with 10 isles could have 2,000, for instance. An isle minimum is always positive though

[digital]

The only sure fire way of doing this would be to find out the average amount of troops/ships on each isle of each member, that way an average can be worked out and then ad eared to. However there are various problems with this method (using me as a prime example), my first few isles are the strongest where as my last 3 isles are the weakest due to the amount of time taken to build them up.

Overall I think that a minimum requirement is unnecessary for the following reasons:

1. A lower member will always be protected by the hive.
2. Higher members are exempt from protection due to pure strength.
3. Personality is always a good trait especially when each player grows everyday. (Therefore activity is of primary concern)

[Pose]

I think activity, and willingness to contribute would be a good place to start, while on IK.UK i was in an alliance with strict admission based on troop/ship count, but it became apparent that the players we were activly seeking were the same players that would not risk losing 2000lws when asked hense their ability to meet our targets.

Looking at player ID and isle count/scores should give an idea of effort put into an account in the first instance, a player with 3 or less isle that started sometime last year wouldnt have been very pro-active in managing their account, so I wouldnt expect a lot in terms of input into our alli either so I would automatically vote no.

Then we should be looking for a little common sense, 500lws and 2500 troops on an isle- while a nice attacking force -is asking to be taken during a war, while 300lws and 2000 troops shows a little more thought has gone into leaving a few men house-sitting..

[Cesium]

While I agree that the main criteria shouldn't be size, we need to remember why we're having this debate. Some small but eloquent players have recently approached us asking to join, and were rejected because they were just too weak. We need to have a way of telling these people to hold off on applying till they have met certain benchmarks. I think that a bare minimum of three isles should be required. By the time you've gotten three isles, you've probably got one decent fleet (100 ish LWS) and basic defense so that the alliance doesn't have to rush to you any time you're vaguely threatened. Also, once you've gotten three isles, you'll have encountered some common problems with others in IK and have had to deal with them, giving you more experience that you might not get if you were pampered in a respected alliance as you grew.

[Arminius]

I think Cesium has made a good point: it's more experience with typical situations that we need, rather than actual numbers of troops. And there is some correlation between number of isles and experience, due to run-ins with other people.

[eproxy]

The other issue one might bring forward is that players who have have joined us with only one isle have stayed active and grown at a decent rate. Admittedly sometimes you can never tell when someone is going to be like that but by creating such isle standard can alienate decent players. People turned away and asked to meet a benchmark first are less likely to stay loyal should they ever actually reapply.

If we do however include a limit on alliance members I think 5-8 isles should be satisfactory for now, probably more towards the latter option if I'm honest.

[Gornall]

I don't know if I am missing the point here but here it goes.

I'm under the impression don't fix what aint broken. How things are done now has created this brilliant alliance of extremely active and intelligent players.

The questionnaire alone is a good test of someones determination, that thing took me about 40mins to complete and anyone who wasn't 100% serious about this alliance wouldnt give it a second look.

Thats my two pence but I'm new so feel free to flame

[Cesium]

I still think that it'd be too easy for someone to start a multi account, feed it up till it's got 2 isles and fair army (about a month and a half) then apply and write a really good application and get in. Then he'd have his own personalized spy in with us. :-| We should have some sort of barrier against that, that filters out anyone like that, and makes sure all our members have experience. Perhaps we can mix up the requirements once it actually gets difficult to get another isle, but for now, we really need something.

[Gornall]

Yeh see where your coming from.

Kind of a thing that can be argued until the end of time.