Just popping in after being told about about this thread and not seeing qz jump in. So here are a variety of quick thoughts, that when summed, is no longer quick. They are in point form for easy criticism.

- tl;dr; -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmgbBSuaYr8

- no one's banned/deleted for disagreeing with or even criticizing the staff. There's tons of instances all over the forums where it sits without anyone touching it. But we decided to just remove posts and people that weren't capable of operating at a certain level of discourse after allowing it for far too long. we should have never engaged in those sort of troll threads wrapped within a suggestion to begin with as it made us (me especially) look worse in the process.

- bad_carpet is dagga, if that wasn't completely obvious.... (Patience, I'm looking at you :p)

- resistance to change and growth of the game are mutually exclusive things. you can't grow the game without changes. if you want this to be a boutique game developed for <750 user community the community needs to be more cooperative and work together rather than divisive and trying to essentially exploit what we do put out there.

- the growth will come on solo servers. the solo servers should be designed to provide a good challenge to experienced players to "try things out" and/or just have fun while allowing new players to get used to the game in a more sandboxed environment before jumping into a pressure cooker (alliance, ffa).

- the time we (qz at this point, basically) get to invest in changes that impact the alliance server is only a fraction of the time spent doing other things to keep the game functional. so even when we get good ideas that we love it's not like we can implement them at any great speed. that's not an excuse, just a reminder of the reality of running any project like this with a very small team in the context of it being a hobby.

- to the point of this thread, I'm not focused on mechanic changes so I won't comment on what's been done recently (#1,#2,#3); there's too many big picture things to do first to make the game be able to retain users (design, help, wiki, public site, etc...). Sorry if you were hoping I would comment on the restart changes!
But I will comment on:

I don't mind sharing what I do/did when I was actively involved in making changes. When we considered changes, ideas would came from lots of places -- players messaging us, seeing stuff in game by playing countries on regular or test servers, stuff from clans filtering to us, B&S or maybe just an idea we had while riding the bus to work. Back when I was playing and developing actively while idling in IRC I would also chat with random people who messaged me about what I was doing to get feedback if it was appropriate to do so. I know qz and martian do too.

Usually when there is an idea that someone feels strongly enough about to share with the group it gets posted on a game dev forum and discussed more thoroughly -- all mods have access there too. Sometimes it's a discussion about a problem looking for solutions, sometimes it's just an idea, sometimes it's something to improve. Back when Slag was still active he would usually do a bunch of math to figure out how to balance it, which was awesome. One aspect of the discussion is usually how to build it (if it requires building) or what aspects we want to tweak to achieve the effect. A few folks usually try to poke holes in the logic/math so we don't create exploits or unintended consequences. Usually some irc convos between ppl too.

Once a change is added it's tested out on the test servers (alpha servers) which I believe qz opened up a few months ago for public testing. Those servers allow us to alter parameters (turn rate, units, turns, etc) without impacting production servers. If we like it, it goes out. If not, back to the drawing board for tweaks. Hopefully we get to deploy it in a changeset that rolls out across the servers as they reset. That's at least the ideal flow for testing -- not everything gets that sort of treatment or goes that smoothly.

So if you want some of my actual thoughts on making changes...

- qz is nearly done with the AI updates (making what I did a year or two ago work with the new changes he made to the framework...) so there will be a way to create AI elements for the game.

- I favour big, bold changes that shake things up and are a challenge to create correctly over balancing things in a cat-and-mouse game of optimization versus players. i've been focused on non-mechanics for so long that my head is completely in the new concept world.

- I posted this on the dev board a few days ago, but IMO the solution to killing is to simply remove the concept of killing. a possible way to achieve that is that instead of dying and starting a new country you just keep your existing country and enter an occupied state where you effectively run the insurgency against those who attacked you, opening up a new set of options to the "killed" player. the mechanic I mentioned involved the players who attack you occupying some portion of your country (weighted toward breakers) being forced to pay occupation costs (troops need to stay to quell the resistance & maybe cash/food costs that you can choose to pay (not paying makes the insurgency stronger)). Your clanmates can liberate your country by taking it back over or via "killing" the folks who are occupying a country. this sort of mechanic would allow users to keep the same country and keeps the users playing the whole time. it also stunts FS's by creating additional costs to overextending. anyway, it's a skeleton of a concept that may be worth fleshing out.

- an additional idea I've been floating for a while (and have probably posted on AT) is for the clan mechanic to be expanded for this server -- not just with allowing pacts to be in-game entities but for clans to effectively be a federal level of government and for countries to become states. then the clan leaders who want a deeper experience can run the federal stuff for the clan. again, this is still a sort of skeleton concept but that opens up a lot of new options.

- both of the above points only work if we do them correctly. I don't want features to feel tacked on or ruin the overall spirit of the game. but at the same time, moving the game forward and making new, challenging aspects sounds more appealing than trying to make what everyone is sick of more palatable.

- any changes we make don't solve the underlying issues with the community -- which generally revolve around the maturity of this community. by mature, I mean that only the most hardcore and dedicated players remain here after years of widdling the community down (via the game's lack of evolution & the community's nature). everyone is highly dedicated. nothing bothers anyone anymore, nothing is new or shocking. when we catch people doing obviously horrible, horrible things the first reaction from some folks (often leaders of major alliances...) is that we are doing it as part of some kind of political agenda against a clan we don't like. there is way too high of a portion of people that think qz or I read their messages/posts because we're super evil. if we delete/ignore troll threads, it only validates the troll's content. when those sort of posts occur on the forums and the collective response isn't "stfu you stupid troll" it leaves me feeling like we can't engage the wider community in any sort of public consultation as the conversation gets so polarized and negative so quickly.

- so to sum it up, if this community (alliance server) wants an admin team that is responsive to their needs, engaged and active I think this community needs to do more to create the environment conducive to us wanting to be engaged. We can make code changes but the biggest obstacle is getting positive changes and contributions from the community or any code changes are for naught. I've said this dozens of times and all I get for it is flamed.