Wow, someone who can write as much crap about Idaho as much as I can. Not sure who you are in-game, but it's nice to see things from other perspectives.
First on Prime time, every world I've ever played on has managed to agree on a prime time, until Idaho. It's always been the unfortunate case that North Americans are about 25% of the player-base, I've actually always advocated for an American timezone server, but as roughly 75% of us are European or English, the times where we could
physically fill battles was just after Euro dinner time. This wasn't an ideological stance, it was simple statistics. Most players play on multiple worlds, I believe, and have real lives outside of Tombola Simulator, the vast majority simply don't want 3 idaho battles a day ranging from 4pm to 4am, and when we see that crap in the fort overview, we simply sigh and go play a better and more stable world.
Now remember Idaho, in the traditional time-slot for Prime time, we were having, for example, 80 vs 80 battles. Not amazing but you could build that up over a few months to be 100 vs 84 and even onto large forts. Americans wanted night battles and we obliged at first because I am extremely sympathetic to the timezone issue, these were something like 30 vs 15 battles. It doesn't take a lot of statistical analysis to figure out this wasn't sustainable for us as players, or for the poor soul who had to lead a slaughter like this past midnight for themselves, or in most cases we didn't have leaders for the night battles.
Twice, there was an alliance that was SOOO OP that they decided they could make the rules for everyone.
This actually happened constantly. First was Warhammer trying to control the entire server, then DF and the Russians had all the gravitas, then the Russians quit and DF became so weak that Salt Ops had to literally Schism and try to work with players we didn't particularly like (fun fact, we worked with every single fort town on that world at some point, such was our commitment to finding a way to have quality fights) to try to salvage something after months of domination and nothing happening to change that.
but when the table is turned, all of a sudden they want to quit and run to another world and claim the world is dying
Quite vague but I assume it's aimed at Sultans of Salt leadership. We've always tried to be the underdogs; in Salt Ops we opposed the original nugget town by recruiting lots of tanks. We were getting our asses kicked for the first 6 months of the world, but eventually we caught up with the power curve and became a worthy opponent. Then we performed a Salty Schism when DF weakened to the point we were dominating them, we try to team with MDM Madhouse, but they took our place in Salt Ops instead, forcing us to go team with DF, which made us once again OP af. Then we went Solo alliance, and wanted the whole world to fight us. Then we sent our best active battle leader to DF after DF lost their last leader in TinCan, and New Freedom insisted that they were no longer going to dig us (as some kind of political move that they quickly went back on when we went over their heads and provided ourselves with an opponent). Again we were willing to work with anyone, but half of SO refused to play with DF and the other half refused to play with Tony, Half of NF refused to play with Sultans and the other half refused to fight with with DF, and half of DF refused to worth with anyone at all, until they realised how strong they were with Sultans, and were upset that this overpowered alliance wasn't to our liking.
If you want to talk about a town taking unilateral action that had negative consequences for the entire world, then look no further than mdm's madhouse. She stole an entire town, then switched sides to fight with DF, then switched sides to fight with SO, then switched sides to go 3rd alliance solo, then refused any diplomacy for 4 months, then quit. All while messing about with up to 30 precious fort fighters and forcing everyone else to counter her actions for the sake of balance.
Thing is, when that one alliance is having all the fun winning all the battles
I take huge issue with this statement, who the hell thinks winning every battle is fun? What's the point in having a fight if the outcome is already known? Is this truly how you, mysterious unknown player, saw Sultans of Salt? Genuinely interested in the answer to that.
As I mentioned earlier, the older worlds didn't magically become perfect overnight. Most of them took a few years.
Since I don't know who you are, I have no idea if you were ever involved in Idaho's politics. MY GOD it was a nightmare and drove experienced leaders away before the world even properly started. It was like talking to a brick wall, no consensus was ever possible because it seemed that no one actually knew what they wanted, and one prominent "leader" simply wanted chaos as like a social experiment or something?
TBH on most old worlds, the sides were decided pretty early on, we always had dig rotations and schedules, most importantly we had enough players to support competitive fort battles and to drive for innovation and improvement because there was a chance you might not get a space in the battle if you weren't built suitably. This was a big issue on idaho, as you don't need to skill for battles to guarantee a spot in an under-filled fort, therefore there was no HP, further driving down the quality of the battles. It wasn't really possible to swap towns around either, because DF never had an issue being OP, and MDM/Tony never understood that there was even an issue.
They didn't try to pit elite vs. nugget munchers, as you claimed that you guys did. A lot of people ended up being excluded or just in a state of limbo behind that move
Firstly, Nugget munchers vs regulars has become a very common make-up of a West world where the player-base isn't large enough to have multiple large groups of nugger munchers.
Secondly, I'd love to know who we excluded, as we are hyper aware that players are the entire content of this game, and inclusion is very important to me.
and dare I mention that they also have "off-prime" battles?
Seems to be a common misconception that we wanted to make "off prime" battles illegal or something. The point was always that the fight that can physically bring the most players should be the main fight every day, and off primes should be small forts because the world can't support anything larger, if it could even support smalls.
Now you are more than welcome to try to get people to shuffle about to balance things out, we only tried for months so maybe you'll have more luck after a year and with the fact that you aren't seen as the big bad guys of the world.
Does Idaho still have potential? Not for me. All the competent leaders and tanks are gone and from what I'm hearing, people still can't dig the right sized fort for the size of player-base you have there.