Greetings Lane and thank you for such a polite post. The difficulty here is that InnoGames has held a vote in the past over the morale rule that they implemented just like they have with V2. In that vote the players voted that they wanted morale on every world. The company, InnoGames decided not to go with the majority on that occasion because in reality paying players do not want morale. So, while I appreciate your desire to allow the users here to appreciate that the decision was democratic, the reality is that InnoGames already has a history of implementing decisions under the illusion of it being a democratic vote and then doing the reverse if it suits their purpose, even if the votes were close on that occasion unlike with the V2 vote.
Also appreciate that only accounts vote, not customers. This of course means that members of staff can vote through proxy accounts as can customers. There was even talk that if a player cleared their cookies they could vote multiple times. So any online vote, irrespective of its source is not a sign of democracy. Indeed many new accounts have sprung up recently all on the same islands. These are likely to be proxy accounts, namely they are run by the same players even if they have different account names. In this respect there can be no legitimate system for voting for anything online.
Finally this vote does not just extend to Grepolis, the other InnoGames stable game, known as Tribal Wars, went through the same transition too and there some players had over 3,000 cities each. So this new system of game design is not confined to Grepolis, it is across the board with all InnoGames products like this. In this respect it is a corporate decision and it would be incorrect and misleading to assume otherwise as has been the case here.
InnoGames, prior to these votes, recently announced that their game Tribonia was not going to be launched. This of course would mean that the company has lost all its revenue behind developing this. This would have been quite extensive as it was a form of World of Warcraft clone. So InnoGames is also demonstrating that it has a poor games management strategy too. The company, if you check their news section, have been employing more managers, but in my view since the company formed an association with an Asian company, their games are moving more inline with Asian games. This of course means that they are likely to lose a substantial amount of their fifty million customer base of western customers in favour of directing themselves towards the Asian market.
If you have an interest in keeping up with the affairs on InnoGames through their news section, in English, it can be found
here. If you have an interest in the law pertaining to games this relatively simple blog may prove helpful to you. It can be found
here.
Many game companies shoot to fame quite quickly if they have a good original staring product and when they do they have a habit of abandoning their earlier company ethos once they believe they are successful. They succeed at first through a prosumer driven enterprise. This means getting their customers to work for them for no financial rewards. So the prosumers here will be some, but not all, moderators, alliance leaders and core players and anyone that has recommended InnoGames to others.
The downside of adversely affecting your main customer base is that the company can be forced to downsize very quickly. The same happened to Chinese company masquerading as an offshore US company two years ago. By law they were obliged to make payments to all their moderators for work rendered. In this respect the real losers here are not the players, because they play or do not play by choice, but the moderators themselves who agreed to undertake a prosumer role for virtual gold under the belief that the company had a genuine interest in them. In the end many moderators is these types of games are simply a free members of staff. Given the revenue that the company has held, the only fools here are the prosumer moderators, not the players themselves.
Of course it should also be pointed out that all successful MMO companies pay their moderators inline with employment law. I am quite sure that the senior moderators here are paid and will be acting members of staff. In this respect one can appreciate why moderators may vary in their opinions.
In the end the lesson that all customers need to take with them here is never offer your services to any MMO company for virtual goods. Likewise, if you are a player, invest you time wisely and do not blame others for your own internet addiction. MMO companies promote internet addiction and any one versed in examining the new farming system can see that this is clearly the case.
The issue I have here is where does InnoGames offer parental advice over the time that minors need to play their product and why do they pretend to make decisions based on the votes of minors? The time required to play is now of course 24/7 because this is what the new coding demands. So in this respect, legally speaking, it makes sense for the company to obtain a vote because they can attempt to use this if challenged through the courts. However, any class legal action through the German courts would have a field day with this as minors have voted too. In this respect the only real alternative here is for customers to instigate legal action against InnoGames, as indeed has been successfully done against other main online gaming companies that have changed the system to suit their own aims.
So in reality it is a question of either instigating legal action, this is a private affair, or simply going down a silly course of ranting. Like yourself I believe the former is the correct approach and this support your view as to why players here should formally write to the company, and by this I mean write a real letter, not send an email through the support system. This way the customers here can obtain their own legal advice on the matter.
Thank you for allowing the players here to understand the correct course of action, rather than encouraging them to write any further material on this subject though an open forum.
Cyrus
