I don't like the fact that Inno made the wholesaler so.... prohibitive.
My baby beta city took several days to get through a research last month because it needed far more t2 goods than neighbors were willing to trade (neighbors weren't willing to trade ANY). I finally ended up saving up coins to buy all the t2 goods I needed (I think it was 250 of each) and it still took forever to save up the coins, without factoring in having to either buy them in tiny batches with price increasing massively each time or waiting for it to reset at my low level main hall purchase ability)
On my live city, I am sometimes forced to resort to buying steel from the wholesaler some tournaments-which-require-steel tournament weeks because between people needing steel for research and people needing steel for the tournaments, the ten thousand steel I need for completing one level of one tournament province because the province difficulty scales with the number of provinces you have and I'm far outside what Inno thinks is appropriate is sometimes bought from the wholesaler (also to get rid of coins).
So now Inno is penalizing me, again, for scouting farther than they wanted me to, not knowing that it was farther than they wanted me to, and then participating in the events Inno made that made me scout even farther than they wanted me to, by making it impossible for me to get enough steel because my tournament steel costs are so expensive. The tournaments aren't even increasing my province range. They're supposed to be just for getting rune shards. So apparently I can't even do Inno's accepted way to get rune shards because I scouted farther than they didn't tell me I couldn't scout past to get rune shards? Lovely Inno.
a 50% markup of original price is simply too prohibitive, especially given the quantities the new wholesaler is dealing in. People who don't have sufficient active neighbors to obtain quantities of goods required to unlock research in their research tree shouldn't be penalized for trying to progress by buying from the wholesaler. People whose tournament costs have gone so high that when their boosted good comes up in a tournament they completely exhaust their fellowship members' supply of tournament goods shouldn't be penalized for trying to participate. The obvious solution is to simply turn to fighting.... but so many people came to this game because they suck at fighting games and don't want to fight. They shouldn't be penalized for not wanting to.
Unless Inno wants to rebrand Elvenar as a turn based strategy game because that's what they're trying to turn it into, Elvenar is a city building game and combat is optional. Changes to force players to turn to fighting are therefore completely contrary to Inno's marketing tactics. Deceptive marketing tactics? This perhaps, in my mind, crosses the line between "changes are expected during online play" and "deceptive bait and switch tactics". I accept that Blizzard will make patches to World of Warcraft, some of which I don't like, but the game will always involve players forming raids and killing bosses. I don't expect them to ever release a patch which turns World of Warcraft into a Pokemon esque game, removing all the bosses and making optional battle pet battles the only way to progress your character, because that's deceptive practices, promising people a game with raiding bosses and giving them Pokemon. Inno promised us a city builder. Not a turn based strategy game like Civ. Actually that's a bad comparison because Civ actually has legitimately peaceful winning methods.
