A little over two days ago, we crowned an emperor in our guild on a low populated server (no names being mentioned). To say the least, this emp was ill prepared and didn't have the skill points ready and abdicated the throne shortly after getting emperor. For the next two days, our guild fought tooth and nail to preserve the inner keeps as "red". However, exactly 48 hours later, we noticed something that we have not read anywhere else happening; a new emperor was crowned on our faction, without a single emperor keep flipping. There was no maintenance, nothing out of the ordinary that would have caused emperor to change, except the new emperor was crowned precisely 48 hours after the previous emperor abdicated.
With all the complaining going around that "passing" emperor to the next person in your alliance as being "unintended", it is looking more and more like this method of "passing" was indeed intended. Why would the devs have a "Emperor by default" if this wasn't intended? Why would the message "abdicated the throne" be in the game in the first place? Unless, it was an intended mechanic to strengthen your alliance.
I do not advocate that anyone "flip" emp as fast as they can, in fact we only pass emp when we loose it, otherwise, we hold it for as long as we can, however when our current emp is deposed, we drop it to the next person in our faction.
Let me lay out some of the pros and cons I've seen with this over the course of a few months. Argue if you will, but this is actual "in-the-field" experience.
Emperor Dropping
The act of dropping emperor to your alliance when you have been organically deposed.
PROS
1. Giving everyone hope of being crowned emperor tends to make a server a lot more active
2. Having multiple former emperor buffs tends to strengthen a group which can strengthen the alliance -- a 100-man raid of former emps is effectively a 101 man raid, and a 500 man raid is effectively a 505 man raid.
3. Cycling emperor helps identify the really strong and adaptive players, which can identify, at a future date a more permanent emperor -- points, how long someone can play is not in my opinion or many people's opinion a good metric for determining if someone makes a great emperor/player; anyone can afk in a heated battle to get defense ticks 24/7 with the aid of multiple people playing the account.
CONS
1. Former emps on other servers seem to think that this cheapens their "title" that they somehow earned differently (How did they earn the points differently btw?).
Hoarding Emperor and Locking the Scoreboard
In case you don't know what this is, it is the act of someone playing 24/7 for 2-6 weeks straight, effectively placking more than 1,000,000 ap between himself and the second person in line and never dropping emperor.
PROS
1. All former emps feel elitist. This is a con
CONS
1. Other players become demoralized, they leave as they see no hope of ever obtaining the crown themselves. The only motivating factor besides emp is the end-of-campaign reward which is less than leveling an alt from 0 to 30, which takes just a few hours.
2. Having a lack of former emperors, against an opposing alliance with a lot of former emerperors places the alliance at a disadvantage.
3. These emperors tend to be very weak emperors, they don't group with other players, and afk at large battles to collect all defensive ticks unless they actively have emp.
THE REAL PROBLEM
The real problem seems to me that people do not respect the choices of others. If I earn emperor and "choose" to abdicate it to someone in my alliance, I feel that as earning that position, I have the right to do so. I also feel that if I earn it and want to retain it for myself for as long as I legitimately beat other players as per the rules, that is also my right to do so, but it is not my right to complain about players leaving the campaign because I did so. Everyone earned the points to get where they are, trying to dictate what they do with the crown seems to the the epitome of a mob tyranny.
Edited by leewells on 4 July 2014 07:28