Since we have been asked about details for reasons as to why some language versions did not proceed with the elections, although they did have more than 2 candidates to start with, I would like to shed some more light on the decisionmaking process.
First of all I would like to point out that the decisions for or against moving forward with the elections were made in close cooperation of the Community teams of the respective language version and the Grepolis team here in Hamburg. Between August 13th and August 15th we reviewed all applications and looked into all listed criteria for eligible candidates until we made a final decision on how to proceed.
In a lot of cases, we unfortunately found that candidates were using inactive or new accounts for their applications, making it hard to judge their knowledge of the game and to confirm the account age of their main account.
Unfortunately in some other cases we found that applicants were burrowing forum accounts from other players to avoid a review of their personal accounts altogether, e.g. because they had previously faced infractions with their main accounts.
The player council is a project meant to allow for more transparency and trust between the development team and the community. As such we expect every candidate to make truthful statements about their accounts. Since that was not always the case, I would like to give the following recommendations for the next candidacy period:
– When posting your application on the forums, please use your main game account!
– Don’t lie about your age.
Local Council candidates can be minors, only to proceed onward to the Inner Council we require candidates who have reached the age of maturity due to the privacy policy regulations.
– Avoid very exotic applications.
We had cases in which candidates pretended to play roles of fictional characters or animals. These candidates have been contacted and did not rephrase their applications or show intend to take part in the project in a professional way. We had to consider these as troll applications and rule out their candidacy.
– Stick to the game rules and be a role model.
If recent severe violations of the game rules are found for the account, we unfortunately cannot accept the candidacy. It can help to be upfront about previous violations if they have not been repeated since.
Finally I would like to emphasize that elections being cancelled for a certain market does not necessarily mean that all candidates were ineligible. However, we need to determine at least 2-3 candidates with clean records in order to allow for the elections to take place.
For some versions we had to disqualify some candidates due to the reasons mentioned above. However, there have still been some valid candidates that we would like to see again as applicants for the next term! So keep your records clean and see you again next time around!