If this runeshard to kp was a long term plan, I can see why they so drastically downgraded the tournament, but they didn't consider that they also downgraded the AWs that require spells to work. They got an excessively punitively downgrade for access to spells, and then there's the hit for the higher squad size, so it was a double hit. Most people have so many spells, it goes unnoticed, but with the level of access to spells if you actually use the AW that need them, they are under powered because the tournament changes cut off access to the spells they require, and like all the other AWs they also got hit with the penalty for half the benefit from level 30 on.
And what a joke the monitoring on beta was. People had abundant everything and some were depleting those resources to try and keep up. Who wants to be a long term player and stripped down to a newbie because of poorly thought out actually good ideas. I think the runeshard to kp is a good idea, but not worth harming fundamental parts of the game that sooo many people say isn't fun anymore.
The tournament steepness is too high, the AW penalty is too high and the penalty for placing premium expansions is too high. A square root, or even a radical root, like x^.6 would tamper down the increasing penalty so the game is no longer regressive. And then reducing the steepness on how fast the tournament ramps up in difficulty.
From province 10 the difficult goes up by 4.5% and 3% would be better, and from province 17 it is 3.6%, and 2.0% would be better, and just leave it at 2.0%. The breakeven with what we have would be around province 60, but the difficulty at province 34 would be 167% instead of 202% and at province 50 would be 199% instead of 218% and would breakeven around province 60, and then be steeper than current design, well, from province 35 it would be steeper, but less difficult until province 60. It is just way too steep in this part of the game.
