@shareshark
I've only played for six months, but the problem you're describing was obvious from the start, and becoming more obvious every day. There's a real need for features that encourage cooperation within guilds, and a need for a reduction of time consuming, repetitive tasks.
A quick fix for the first might be some form of ad hoc mini-games, similar to events, with similarly instantly gratifying rewards, where rewards depend on actual cooperation. Long term benefits from advancing the guild are all well and good, but nothing beats instant gratification to get people interested. I can think of several possible guild quest tasks that could be used to accomplish cooperation, though I won't list them. The may require some new database operations, but nothing comprehensive. Options for supporting fellow guild members through enhancing existing features (e.g. donate 10,000 silver to give a 10% defence boost to a member with troublesome neighbors) would also be fairly simple to implement, and motivate people to engage within their guild. A longer term fix would require changes to GvG and GE, or the introduction of something entirely new and substantial.
I'm not accomplished enough in it to say anything definite about GvG, but I would suspect that satisfactory changes, that would affect the majority of players, would require expanding the Guild Continent, to allow more guilds to participate, more complex overall strategies, and the creation of limits to individually active players, reducing their impact without reducing their activity. Giving guild members some ability to aid each other in GE may make that more collaborative, as well. I can think of a couple of possible ways, that may or may not be realistic. To keep it short... shortish... well, shorter than it would otherwise be, I won't list them.
The second is both easier and nearly impossible to fix: Inno will have to ease off just slightly on the natural greed that dominates all commercial endeavors. The tedious, repetitive tasks are strong motivators for buying premium features. Even the tasks that can't be done with such features help motivate players to spend diamonds to save time where they can. It also keeps players logged on, without the need for Inno to come up with any actual content, each minute of which they just
may decide to spend diamonds. Weirdly, some players actually enjoy these types of things, but they can be easily satisfied by giving them the slightest benefit from doing things the endlessly repetitive way.
@Dane thorson
The first negative I noticed about the game was the primitive battle engine, and the limited strategic map (essentially the Continent Map, which doesn't allow for a whole lot of strategy). In a regular strategy game franchise, these are the things that would be developed further in the next version of the game. If FoE is to keep players interested, they'll need a more sophisticated battle engine. A gradual introduction could be made by introducing it in a newly created era, and later expand it to previous eras. It should long ago have been their number one priority. New units simply don't introduce much new; the battle engine is too primitive to allow for much variation.
The AI is also to weak to pose real challenges, unless it's given absurd advantages in terms of boosts and second waves. It's unable to play for victory, rather than simply exhausting opposing troops, and turns everything into a war of attrition.
Of course, the common denominator for all things that can be done, is that they require real development, which is expensive, and change, which is risky. They have a platform that works, and can be tweaked at minimal expense. Why go to great expense, which may or may not pay off, when they can tweak at nearly no expense, which will almost certainly pay of, at least a little? Why change the fundamentals, or anything at all, when a tiny ad hoc event will make everyone believe that something new has been added? Why make costly changes, that may suddenly alienate a lot of players, when no change will only gradually alienate all players?
Sadly, this will only get worse: The more time that goes by without any fundamental changes, the harder and more expensive they will become. The learning curve before you can work on unfamiliar design/code is steep, and the "forgetting curve" is even steeper; even the original designers/coders will quickly loose the intimate insight necessary to simply pick up again. It's why so-called "legacy code" is a major problem in information systems. Making things worse, every time you make a tiny change, without revisiting the whole, simply to accommodate some ad hoc feature, you essentially create a potential trap to be triggered by any fundamental change. For traditional games, this has been solved either by immediately starting development of the next version, thus continuously working on the fundamentals, or, if there has been a break, simply starting from scratch when making the new version. Both solutions may be out of reach for FoE.
Disclaimer 1: Solid code and design, combined with careful documentation, can make things a lot easier. This requires high professional standards from the first moment, and an awareness that the project may keep growing for years. Needless to say, this is uncommon in online games. Hopefully, FoE is the exception.
Disclaimer 2: I obviously don't know what Inno is working on behind the scenes. Perhaps there is lively development of fundamentals. If so, none of it has been implemented recently, that I have seen after starting playing, or heard of from before I started. Everything I know of has been superficial; even GE is merely tweaking.