Sure, some people like to yap on about how CB is supposed to be competitive and all that jazz (personally, I fail to see how "sacrificing social life and/or sleep in order to burn BA at specific dates and times" is a desirable competitiveness criteria, but let's not digress about BA caps and regen rates) and that's, let's call it arguably fine. However, every now and then, ALMOST EVERYBODY has a period in time eventually when they can find it a problem to log into CB... could be they are leaving for an area with no internet connection, could be they have no mobile internet solution and have to go away from home, could be they're physically incapacitated so they can't get to a computer, a lot of other things, some planned but unavoidable (or at least, nobody in their right mind would consider CB a good excuse to skip it), others accidental (you don't exactly choose to have an accident or emergency surgery or something like that).
To punish people as far as CB performance goes for NOT going beyond what a normal human would be expected to do... now that's just wrong now, isn't it ?
BECAUSE OF THAT, I MOVE THAT WE SHOULD HAVE A VACATION MODE FEATURE IMPLEMENTED A.S.A.P.
Technically, the feature would work the following way : whenever triggered, there is a minimum period of time it will stay active (to prevent abuse) and it will take a while to become really active (again, to prevent abuse) in which time burning any BA would cancel its triggering.
After being triggered and having been succesfully activated, the characters on the account become (for practical intents and purposes) almost like retired - they can't be attacked or otherwise interacted with.
The only outside difference is that the character is still physically present in whatever clan he was in.
From the inside, a few more differences exist, namely that BA is not recharging and you can't buy any BA either. Also, there's a counter displaying the length of time you're considered as having had been in vacation mode.
After the minimum duration has passed (whatever that might be, anything between 24h and 5 days are decent options), the user can select to exit vacation mode. If he comes back earlier than the minimum period, well, tough luck, he has to wait some more.
When reactivated after a vacation mode, the counter that so far has been ticking up recording the duration of time spent in vacation mode will now start counting down... and while it's not yet depleted, EVERY FIGHT WILL BE YIELDING DOUBLE REWARDS (for XP and CB$, but not clan points, those remain normal) AND BA PURCHASE PRICE WILL BE DOUBLE THE USUAL PRICE (on top of any existing modifiers like NCB already increased price). This effectively almost perfectly compensates for the time spent in vacation mode in a relatively fair way.
HOW CAN YOU TRIGGER VACATION MODE ?
The manual trigger option is mandatory.
You can only activate vacation mode when you have 160 BA or less, but it would be highly advisable to activate it after you have burned all your BA, for reasons that will be clear immediately.
The "warm up" period for vacation mode should be at least 4 hours, but preferably more around 8 hours. If you fight, forge or buy BA so your total goes above 160 during that period, the vacation mode request gets canceled.
There should be a warning (preferably on the sidebar, but on every page works too) that you have requested vacation mode and the warm up period is still running, to prevent you from accidentally canceling your vacation mode request without realizing it.
The automatic trigger option would be nice to have, for all unplanned breaks from CB.
To prevent abuse, any BA you migt have in excess of 160 will get discarded when the auto-triggered vacation mode gets activated.
This automatic trigger oprion could be either fixed duration for everybody, it could be user-enableable or even fully user-customizable.
If fixed, a generous timer should be used, like, say, 7 days, to prevent people from unwillingly intering vacation mode. If user-enableable, the timer could be slighty lower, around 3 days or so. For fully user-customizable settings, anything between one day and one week should be selectable.
This will only be processed at cache flush, to prevent heavy CPU usage. If the last login date is longer than the vacation mode timer selected, vacation mode is instantly triggered AND the vacation timer is set to the auto-triggering timer duration minus 8 hours (so, for instance, if the timer was 3 days and you have logged in last 4 days ago one hour after cache flush, your vacation mode gets enabled at this cache flush and your vacation bonus timer gets set to 2 days 16 hours, and keeps increasing from there as long as you're gone).
Yeah, I know, it sounds wordy, but code-wise, is should be relatively straightforward. I just needed to cover all possible abuse methods and apply a CB-favourable (as opposed to user-favourable) tie-breaker for anything potentially abusive. The vacation mode still remains a valuable addition to the game even after all those abuse proofing caveats.