Suggestion to tweak the recruit status system a bit.
The faction you stay in for more than 50% of the past year (365 days) gets marked as your home faction. When you go out and guest elsewhere, you get the usual 3-day recruit status in that faction, but when you return to your home faction, you skip the process.
The desired effect is to spread experience and help other factions build up, which in return increases competition and should enhance gameplay. It also allows you to visit friends and improve the community aspect of the game.
The original reason for the introduction of the recruit status isn't really affected, which was to prevent big alliances from instantly moving all their strongest players into the frontline factions during territory wars.
The whole system would be automated in the background, so you can't manually set a faction you're barely in as your home faction, just in case it might get attacked.
An alternative version could be to have the faction you stay in the longest over the past year be your home faction, in case you move around a lot. For example, if you move around five factions at 30%, 20%, 20%, 20%, and 10% days spent per year, then the 30% one would be your home faction.
Although if you move around that often, you're more of a vagabond and shouldn't really consider a faction your home. In my opinion, it should require 50%+ per year in one faction; otherwise, you don't get the perk/bonus.
Counterpoint: One could argue that someone could still try to abuse the system by having the strongest people stay in the "frontline faction" for most of their time and then return to the faction they actually want to stay in.
But then they would have to constantly switch back and forth between two factions, with days spent in recruit status building up, just to stay prepped. It would also be a gamble which faction is marked as your home faction at the time of a potential attack, so the entire effort might as well be for nothing. I doubt that a significant number of players would be willing to abuse this one weakness.
Optional: Put a cooldown on the perk, so you can only return once every X months without having recruit status.
Curious to hear everyone's opinion on this idea.
Edit: posted in bugs & issues, awaiting reponse, added the idea of still going through recruit status on your way back, if your "home" faction is already in a war (both territory or ranked)