Absolutely it is. I spent at least 12 hours on investigations this round when your family was accused, and I don’t even know how many more last round when @Sol_Invictus was doing something that, although illegal, was arguably reasonable if not for this rule. That’s time I didn’t spend on code, and cooking up tools to let the mods do that in my place is creating unnecessary work to solve the wrong problem.
There’s also operational overhead involved in managing a mod team who may or may not have conflicts of interests if they also play, plus the time spent by individual mods when they are able to investigate. Checking for IA is hugely time consuming, and all for a rule that inhibits what players naturally want to do.
I agree though, @DustyAladdin does make good points. He made similar points in 2017, and we followed the same suggestion he’s making now to make it a galaxy-specific rule. This is why SN allows UA now.
Unfortunately, the optimistic prediction from that compromise didn’t hold true. It’s as much of a problem now as it ever was.
Simply put: our current system isn’t working.
Yes, a debate should be had, and it was had 2 years ago when we tried this the first time. The compromise failed, and it’s time to move on.
You are not wrong about the problems you describe, but the idea that “we shouldn’t do this because X is broken” is not what we need. We need to fix X. If the market is the issue, then we will figure out how to fix the market.
Fwiw, it has been discussed that our concept of families is inherently flawed. We may indeed come to a point where families in their current form are no longer the primary way to group and compete. That isn’t happening anytime soon, but your assessment is valid.
This problem hasn’t changed in the last 2 years since we talked about it, and the flaw it masks is as old as IC itself. It’s time we fix the root issue instead of relying on ineffective band-aids.
We need to fix problems, not hide symptoms. Suggestions for combating the anticipated flaws are welcome in #support:ideas.