I have a alot of time for Derek but WoE cannot be deemed a better alliance than SeS simply based on stats alone.
Any alliance can conquer another into submission, sure they can be considered to be strong and mighty but can they be considered good?
WoE may have taken more SeS cities in the short term but SeS is still going strong whilst WoE is no longer. So in the long view - SeS proved to be the stronger alliance as it could be seen that they forced WoE into a position where merging was the only option.
Also if Grep was purely based on conquest - the game would be fairly dull. Alliances that use other tools such as diplomacy, understanding and communication seem to fair better in the long run.
Then there are the members themselves - an alliance is as only good as it's members and it's members are chosen by the leaders. It could be said that choosing members that run at the first sign of trouble or basically quit would be short sighted and a mistake on the part of it;s leadership. This inturn reflects the effectiveness or for a better choice of words (be it bad or good)the choices made by the leaders and thus the alliance as a whole. The leadership of SeS has managed to keep a good level of quality players within its ranks thoughout - perhaps SeS has a secret method of keeping their players interested in the game or maybe they were just lucky? Only they know.
Also, if an alliance is fighting more enemies than it can handle or can be considered fair - is that not down to poor alliance diplomacy and therefore can it not be said that it is their own fault and in the end due to their own weakness or naivety that took them down that path. Can an alliance that places themselves in a position like this be considered good? Surely it takes more skill to find and maintain a level of gaming equilibrium?
These points I raise a relatively vague and pointless but I hope to promote the idea to some of you that using stats to determine if one alliance is better than another is limited and gives a very myopic view of the whole picture.
Good alliances in my eyes are one's which are able to balance the war aspect of Grep to the diplomatic aspect - with the overall goal of keeping the members of the alliance interested and motivated throughout. And if an alliance can master this art - then surely they would be elevated from being a good alliance to one that is great.
This post isn't a WoE bashing one, I have a lot of respect for the players of WoE - in particular those from Epsilon, yes and that includes you Inc you Enlightened original
But I think a more robust, complete and balanced picture should be created about rating alliances in general rather than just viewing the dullness of grepo-stats.....because doing that is just lazyyyyy boi and far less interesting!
This is slightly off-topic but it would I figured it would be better to try to evolve this thread into one where it moves on from "WoE is crap" followed by "No it isn't, it's better than SeS" as I'm sure it would soon end up with someone simply posting "Yur Momma" and all the fun and games end when someone gets infracted
Here is the special secret sauce about WoE - WoE's demise didn't come from inactives nor did it come from SeS and here is why ----> WoE when it started out looked like a great alliance because of the Epsilon originals - They were a close knit team of players that trusted each other and enjoyed playing with each other as they had been dominating Epsilon for a long time but many of them left fairly early and after they left it seemed more like Derek was more burdened with running WoE - WoE's original core of player basically killed themselves ironically because they are doing so well in Epsilon and thus didn't have the time to play both worlds effectively and still actually have a life. This basically meant that all the alliances that were fighting WoE - weren't really fighting WoE in it's prime but were instead fighting a faded, tired and world weary version.