What is the point of a discussion when it is clear from the tower that there is no will to do anything about exponential growth?
It is quite obvious that neither the number of AW levels nor the number of plots reflects the real strength of the player.
Do we have to believe that you will solve it? When we see that the problem known at the tower has not been solved to this day?
The Spire has been improved incredibly since the first days of testing and since it was first released on Live, even. Many people don't consider it to be ideal still, but it went from being reasonably pointless at the beginning to what it is now, which is an incredible resource provider and worth the cost, despite the difficulty in combat.
These tournaments are not going to be re-set back to how they were before. Not in a million years. They had their reasons for wanting to nerf people's KP gains. I believe they've gone about it in an unnecessarily complicated way that's opened up more problems than it's solved, but I still don't believe they will ever backtrack on the principle of what they've implemented.
It's therefore our job to look at the new system and try all we can to ask them to iron out as many of those wrinkles as possible. Hopefully we can have an impact, but they're only going to listen to the smaller scale suggestions, if they're constructive enough, and if they're highlighted by enough people, enough times.
I hope that the combat and negotiations can be straightened out to the point that it's useful and rewarding for everyone, but I'm going to leave that to those here who have a much better handle on those details and calculations, in terms of losses, etc. For me, there are a few other basic things that I would like to be addressed, as follows:
- Premium expansions should not form part of the difficulty equation. If people are spending hard earned money to give themselves extra space (whilst also supporting the game) then they should have the freedom to leave that space clear, or build a leafy park, or whatever they want to do, without fear that it's going to be a detriment to tournament performance.
- Certain AWs need to be removed from the difficulty equation. People should be able to build and level Wonders like the Elvenar Trade Centre, Sunset Towers, Vortex of Storage, Lighthouse of Good Neighbourhood, Thrones of the High Men, without the same fear that it will hurt their tournament scores.
- Orcs should be removed from the catering combinations altogether. They are already so much in short supply for so many people that it renders the idea of half-priced catering almost entirely moot.