Should an alliance send in a request, even if they're gonna be on a "We'll form if they form" stance?
What's the threshold between superfluous requests for unlikely fights and a useful request even if the fight didn't end up happening (one side stands down or something)?
Yeah, this is indeed difficult to answer. If you know the system, where the fight would be, and you made already preparations for the fight, then it is probably worth to send a request, even if the other side does not show up. But yeah, sending too many requests could again lead to worse performance, if we are running out of dedicated nodes (although in some cases we can avoid this with manual intervention).