I personally have to respectfully disagree with this sentence. FoE currently has one of the best inactive guild founder systems I’ve seen from experience.
To give just three examples from my previous experience over the years of my existence:
- In another very popular browser game I previously played and moderated, you can have a leader and some deputy leaders in a guild. If the leader is inactive for 30 days they go into “inactive mode” where their city is temporarily removed from the map until they return. In this case the entire guild is disbanded when the leader enters inactive mode, no leader role reassignment at all. I hated this system and we got a lot of complaints from players - and I don’t blame them.
- In a second browser game, if the founder goes inactive there’s no reassignment and there’s nothing you can do about it. If the player purchased something with real money, it protected their accounts from being deleted from inactivity (pre-GDPR this was). So an inactive founder who spent money would stay as the inactive founder of the guild forever - game support will not assign a new guild leader at all, they’ll shrug and go “not my problem”.
- In an app I used to experiment with (for a very short time), if the alliance leader goes inactive you need to contact support. Then get down on your knees, beg and (probably) offer them a human sacrifice. This is hit and miss. If the leader “isn’t inactive enough” then the answer is no - but the thing is there is no official criteria set for what “inactive enough” actually is. Some inactive leaders have been replaced with another alliance member by support after a couple months, some are still inactive and “leading” the alliance after a year or more. Players suspect it has something to do with the amount of money the inactive leader spent, but this is just an unproven theory. Support is extremely inconsistent, speak broken English and are clearly untrained or at least poorly trained in this app.
By far, Forge of Empires has the best system I’ve seen when it comes to inactive guild leadership. And, compared to the above, we are very lucky to have the support team and the inactive founder reassignment system that we have.
A poor leadership is the fault of only the founder. The laziness or bad organisation skills of founders is not something that the developers can fix. It is the founder’s sole responsibility to ensure there is a strong leadership to unlock GE and so forth, as well as make sure there’s someone in place for the role to be reassigned to should they end up going inactive in unforeseen circumstances (maybe they’ll get flattened by an escaped rhino tomorrow? Who knows?)
The only thing I don’t like about the FoE guild system is that any founder can disband a guild at any moment they like. For example, when they’ve come home drunk after an argument with the wife, completely flushing all the guild’s years of hard work down the toilet in... five seconds? This needs changing, I agree. I even made a couple of suggestions in the forum regarding this. But in terms of inactive founder reassignment, the system here is better than most others out there by a thousand miles.
