Heartily agree that purge meters should never slip into reverse, but moreso because it’s discouraging to active players who also need to maintain a healthy work/ life / gaming balance. IMO/IME, it’s better suited as a PvE challenge / reward than as a clean-up mechanism.
I do agree about the need for a better clean-up function though. The ease with which bases can be kept refreshed indefinitely by people who no longer “play” (particularly by griefers) is a big reason why I decided to start a private server for my friends and I.
Ironically, I haven’t exactly decided on what to do with all of my own builds. There are quite a few structures I built on #1502 to preempt common trolling practices such as walling off New Asagarth or the Well of Skelos, and it’s gotten back to me that some of the remaining players are apprehensive about losing public works such as bridges, maprooms, etc.
Still, I’d wager there is a far-greater incidence of refreshers keeping servers chock-full of spam than of those keeping anti-griefing countermeasures intact.
IMO, we need to figure out a better way of implementing a clean-up system than what we’ve got now regardless. At 7 days, the current default decay period provides a small chance at being able to catch a refresher unaware (which is why I’ve supported it), but just as often it seems to punish those who had a life emergency only to come back and find a source of joy has been lost.
One system I’d be in favor of is to slowly decrease the maximum decay time of a clan’s holdings if their players aren’t actively playing. By this I mean, if you’re only logging the 5-10 minutes a week it takes to make a circuit of your bases, then your max decay time should start slipping from 168 hours. With a system like this. After several weeks or months of such behavior, perhaps a clan’s max time might even reach a low of 24 to 48 hours.
On the flip side, this could also be a means of rewarding active players. Perhaps this would make it feasible to to increase max decay time beyond 7 days to benefit long-time players so that folks can afford to take a family vacation, weather an in-patient hospitalization, or the like without having to jump thru hoops.