Somewhere along the line we went from "Hey, CF is down... let's all go check out the Travian game and see what's up." to "Play constantly and don't be in an area which has an enemy Brahk-like player in it or you're getting the boot." If you go back and read some of the forum posts here you'll see quite a few people suggesting that we not even allow non-QHCFers into the alliance at all.
On one hand, if someone is being inactive (red dot) or is consistently a farm we should do something about it (kick them and/or help them). On the other hand, I don't see what the big deal is about everyone chipping in and bumping the embassy a notch or two in order to bring in more players and still keep our allegiances to the QHCF crowd.
What I find particularly disturbing is that the leaders of the Alliance are being actively recruited by other alliances and aren't responding with raids and/or catapults. How could anyone expect us peons to strive to work harder when the leadership is ready to drop us like a hot rock because a prettier girl batted her eyelashes at you? I also wonder how many of them sent out IGMs, actively recruiting other alliance leaders. I'm betting very few.
What's particularly retarded about this whole concept of winning is that these servers generally come down to two confederations duking it out at the end. "Winning" in this sense just means the coin toss landed you on the Eastern side of the map rather than the Western side... or vice-versa. It's ridiculous to assume that we would be the leading alliance at the end. That'd be like expecting your first character in CF to be the next Cabdru. It's absurd really.
Either way, this whole nonsense of people having unrealistic expectations of getting immediate reactions to a forum post, or assuming that a person is growing slow because they suck (rather than they were stuck in an unlucky map location) is preposterous. In the last week or so the fun factor of Travian has been cut in half for me. I hope it gets better soon.
Later,
Rade