With no public plans or future mergers in sight, I wanted to open a thread to say things in advance. Nothing particular, if someone want to add their opinion on mergers, it's welcome.

I think that the admins of each community should open a discussion forum in advance to see what are the opinions of the user base. Nothing conclusive, but just to give a way out to many thoughts that many users have been collecting over the years. It's a win-win, in my opinion, since sometimes useful thoughts may be taken in account by GmeForge, and, on the other side, it's like an escape valve to the thoughts of the users. Much better than being presented by a merge plan directly which might or might not be welcome.

Now, in particular, after discussing mergers for a while, there are important aspects of the game that might not be taken in account by GameForge. And which could arise in those forum debates I say. Here are two particular examples (one of them is an actual kind of proposal that needs some work on the programming side probably).

First, in case of a merger, people might want an old universe, with lots of history and stories in him. So, I think it should be possible to discuss about what would be the end universes, and I guess if we have one universe which is x2 eco x2 fleet 50% debris, and another with x4 eco x2 fleet 50%, the latter shouldn't be necessarily the destiny, it might be preferred to have the first one as destiny and changing there the x4 eco in the config. Is that a problem? Because to the users it looks as simply changing a digit in a config file.

And second, a (big) problem with inactives. Sometimes there's a merger in which the destiny universe has much less (and smaller) or even nonexistent inactive players. I believe this is a big deal. While not everybody farms inactive players, the growth of the universe in general is powered in great part by them (this happens in high speed old universes, like Fornax.es, Fornax.fr, Electra.de, etc.). So I believe than even if there are two universes x4 30%, and x5 50%, and the end universe is going to have x5 50% configuration, it should be open to change the config of the first universe and move the accounts from the second one.

In this case, with inactives, there might be a problem in galaxies 1 to 4 mostly, and is that almost all the positions are taken by accounts in eternal v-mode or inactives, so, in case of a merger, it's ineffective. I open this thread with the intention to get answers from GameForge to see what can and can't be done in this case. I believe there wouldn't be any problem to delete certain v-moded, banned, or even smaller inactive accounts (since they are going to be deleted anyways if the universe is considered as origin rather than destiny). For instance, the smallest accounts that have been more than three years without any log in, etc. This would free space for the incoming accounts, and also keep a good amount of inactives that would boos the growth of the universe. Other option would be to move the planets of such accounts and disperse them evenly through all galaxies. This would make space available in all galaxies.

Could you consider this and take it in account in future mergers? Is it a lot of energy on your side to “clean” universes to make them able to receive a universe fusion?

Thanks.
And any other opinion anyone has on mergers, is welcome in this thread

@ErikFyr But my point is that not only "where" but in a way "how". Example: if you have 3 universes

x4 eco x4 mines 30% debris
x4 eco x4 mines 30% debris
x5 eco x5 mines 50% debris

I would like to be moved to the first universe but with x5 eco x5 mines 50% debris. The discussion should be not just "which destiny" but also take in account that even if you want a merger with certain characteristics, it could at the same time choose which universe is destiny and then the config is applied to that universe.

But yes, flexibility in general is welcome.

Ah, and another thing: “let the players decide” is usually a problem since the counting of the votes, or even the question to be asked is not always welcome*. Personally I would prefer over that the approach of “Debate here and GameForge will take it into account”, which of course people would not want, but it's more realistic.

* An example The last anniversary universe was asked to the community, and there was a majority of people asking in Spain to get x6x2, x5x2, or x6x3 universe with 0.5 deuterium consumption. But when the counted they votes they did in a different manner they looked at combinations rather than eco and fleet independently. And the result was fun: 20 people wanted x6, 20 people voted x5, and 12 people voted x4 eco. And the outcome was that x4x2 is what the majority want because it happened that x4x2 fleet combination was voted by 7 people. It's a way to count, but in that case it didn't reflect what the community wanted. And then they looked of those 7 people and saw that 2 or 3 voted 0.8, and voilà, 0.8 deuterium consumption, while more than 40 people voted 0.5.

My particular comments about merges are oriented towards a cleaning of the universe to have more room for newcomers.

I imagine GameForge saying that it's not possible to merge into an universe where there's little to zero free positions in G1-G4. So what I'm saying is that sometimes it would be welcome (and good for the game) to have such universes as destiny, which would need some cleaning before the merge takes place.

My intent, saying this in advance, is to open this debate so that GameForge will develop some procedures to clean universes before a fusion takes place.

The same way tons of accounts are going to be lost when a universe is selected as origin of a merge, they could do something with those accounts so that the universe could be considered as destiny. Wether it's removing the smallest accounts or may be just spacing their planets to higher galaxies to ensure room in lower galaxies, or any other idea, it would be welcome.

I think this would be beneficial, and only requires a little bit of effort on their side.