Regardless of whether people find that the term MRA should be used to refer to alliance which recruit in large numbers indiscriminately, it still doesn't change the reasons that people have for frowning upon large alliances, which is part of what makes "MRA" a popular term.
There is no way in which are 200 player alliance can have the same bond and cooperation between all players as one with 30 players. When you're part of such a big alliances, you are just a tiny part of a big blob, which makes them seem quite impersonal. 200 people cannot sensible discuss alliance activities or properly coordinate joint activities. If there are many good an active players, it's a strong unity, but still one without any face.
I hate the fact that while a lot of exciting wars could be going on in an area early in the game, many of the top ranked players just join a single alliance, meaning that it just becomes a boring stand-still of taking out inactives and beating on the smaller players. If alliances just keep recruiting their way through the oceans, instead of fighting their way and growing normally, they really loose some of their meaning.
I think that big alliances are more accepted the older a world becomes, for several reasons:
1) It's hard for a small group of players to do anything significant on their own. With everyone having hundreds of biremes and level 25 city walls, a group of 10 people would be unlikely to take down cities of active people with allies in their area.
2) With more players able to fight and focus fully on fighting, it makes sense to have bigger battle fronts. With so many players being able to participate, it makes more sense that bigger units are fighting each other, since any action will be on a large scale, making the conquest of a single city fairly insignificant.
3) Most alliances are quite established if they have had the chance to stay alive for more than three months. This means that they have at least developed some relationships, a sense of personality and a history. These elements create much more of an alliance, and a shared idea of the alliance can more easily be preserved despite ten members leaving one day and ten others joining the other.
