[Achilles]

In response to KB: I have just made it my mission, and I'm actually going to work at it, to make sure as few members of your BG finish next round in the Top 100 as possible. Thank you for giving me my motivation in a round where that otherwise might have been difficult.

As regards our member levels, there will not be 150 planets playing for asc next round. Whilst I believe there are currently ~130 people with access to #ascendancy, many of them are not playing next round and quite a few have not played in some time. We frequently don't kick members from our channel if they are taking a round or five off, especially if they have been in the alliance a long time. Even after the infamous reset post R28 a huge number of non-playing people were immediately re-added under the "furniture" clause.

It's also important to consider how recruitment in Ascendancy actually works. In brief: any member, regardless of the length of time they have been in the alliance, can propose someone new for membership. All that is required is to issue a prop command to munin detailing the reasons why you think we should recruit so and so. Everyone then gets a vote on it and the majority carries. This results in a lot of very new members inviting even more new members and so on.

Simply put this is our current philosophy on how to be successful in Planetarion. Far too many alliances are ruled by powerwhores who think they know better than everyone else and make all their decisions for them. Who they'll play with, how much intel they need to play efficiently and so on down the line. It's been widely discussed that many of the BG's cropping up this round are happening for exactly this reason and in such an environment it's hardly surprising that Ascendancy is also popular.