I agree, and my comments were based on that. The League is fundamentally different in that gaining the advantage requires payment directly.
Absolutely, the only argument I have is to say that paz2win includes "winning" something. Being in the gold league is not winning anything of importance. you get a few gimmicks and a portrait and the best thing is a "double" of a set building. Nothing one could call a serious advantage. So I´d rather call it pay2brag instead of pay2win
And as I said before I find this a completely acceptable (even positive) thing for everybody involved, good for Inno to make money, good for paying customers that have fun doing it and good for all non-paying players that have their bills paid by somebody else without the game balance being hurt
I suspect that we mainly disagree on this point. I agree that having lots of premium expansions is a significant contributory factor to ranking score (although there are many other factors too). With the demise of wishing wells, there are far fewer free diamonds around than there were a year or two ago. That obviously makes the accumulation of premium expansions by a free-2-play player much more difficult. It would be very hard for an entirely free-2-play player starting now to eventually (several years down the line) reach the very top end of the rankings. I consider that it would still be possible though.
Which other factors would say there are? I don´t know much about ranking, I have never even tried it, so my imagination is rather limited. For a free2play town all I can think of is plastering the entire city with Magic residences, factories and armories and nothing else. Maxing out all AWs of course. That´s obviously the standard. But that´s not enough if you want the top spot. You need more space for more of the same. The first premium expansions are cheap enough to be accessible for everybody, but diamonds generated by the game are just not enough to even get close to the last expansions, at least not diamonds generated over say 5 years of playing.
Wishing Well farms were ended exactly because of this loophole, it made pay2win available for non-paying players
And even then the amount of wishing wells needed to buy the last premium expansions would have been rather staggering, I don´t remember how many, but I did at some point calculate it, just for the sake of it when a friend asked if it was possible. anyway that is not going to happen anymore.
As you've discussed, other arenas benefit from diamonds too (and they are probably essential to win in the Fellowship Adventures). Changes over the past year or so have certainly moved both FA & Tournaments towards providing paying players with more of an advantage. My guess is that you (and most of your fellows) have put a much higher proportion of your won-in-game diamonds into FAs & tournaments than city infrastructure. I've done the opposite. Our perspectives may therefore be different.
Well hard to say what other fellows do, but since the beginning of the new tourney system I have put exactly 0 diamonds into city infrastructure and it will stay that way until the tourney formula is changed. Chapter progress is stopped, so I have no need to upgrade Magic buildings and Premium expansions are a pay2lose deal under the current formula, so no thank you.
I spend rather few diamonds overall, simply because I have no place where I can spend diamonds that is useful, with one exception and I can´t spend as many as I gain every week there either, so my diamonds total is slowly increasing all the time. That is MA flipping. Now in theory of course one can flip the MA as often as one has diamonds, but the only real reason to do so are 5-day-booster buildings, since I have a steady supply of them (I tend to keep between 50 and 100 of them in my inventory) there is no real reason to flip the MA more often than I do.
FAs need no further diamond investment beyond that. The only necessary adjustment was to move the MA flipping to the FA weeks rather than to do it whenever one feels like. So the diamonds storage is turned into an upwards zig-zag instead of a steady increase.
The amounts of diamonds necessary would of course be higher if you were the only VV badge producer in a FA winning FS, but that is highly unlikely
As long as you have a FS where everybody wants to win an FA (and you should if you want to win) diamonds is not going to be the thing to stop you. I have a hard time estimating, but I would guess less than 1000 per town and FA?
Actually the way I play right now, I have the opposite case, the MA flipping I do during the FAs makes enough booster buildings, so I never have to flip the MA outside FAs, so one could argue that FAs cost me diamonds, but I spend none on MA flipping instead. But the difference is so small I guess it is pointless discussing that.
As an aside, how much a difference do you think it would make if a player was averaging a spend of a couple of thousand diamonds each week on generating booster buildings ? I reckon that the tournament impact (relative to a player spending nothing) would be significantly more than a second fire phoenix.
Interesting question! I haven´t thought of it that way.
It´s a bit difficult comparing the 2, because well we can´t get a second firebird anymore, but lets see:
Option 1: buying a second firebird: a 1-time (huge) investment with the bonus being permanent for the lifetime of the city.
Option 2: Buying boosters: it is a rather opposite approach: constant (moderate) investment for temporary bonus, that ends the second you end spending.
From a gameplay perspective I would prefer option 2. Permanent boni are just too powerful. So I am happy we have option 2, but not option 1.
A couple of thousand diamonds a week is actually rather a lot, so we are definitely in a pay2win game here, not in a free diamonds scenario. I don´t actually keep track of how many diamonds a building costs, so I can´t say. but we are definitely talking extra buildings every week. But how many? I would say single digits somewhere.
Now is that better than a second firebird? Mainly depends on the tourney, I would say: in Marble/Steel probably yes, in Planks/Scrolls probably no.
The big thing about the Firebird is it boosts every units damage, while buildings only boost M and LR damage (by more than 1 bird) and all units HP.
Since we are talking rather high end here, I guess we are also talking high end tourney scores, say 15-20k as minimum goal? And for high end tourney score I will always use buildings, so we are talking 10-15 buildings plus 2 firebirds vs. 15-20 buildings plus 1 firebird. Does that sound like a reasonable assumption?
In this scenario I think I would go for the firebird option in any tourney. The difficult tourneys (which are the ones where I need units other than LR+M) obviously so. But I think even in the easy Marble/Steel weeks where I usee mostly LR+M the Firebird would help me more, simply because the losses I have mainly come from the difficult fights not the easy ones.
Just to illustrate what I mean: 1 province in marble will make me fight 5 times with mages (against mostly HM) and 1 time with HR (against other stuff). the buildings will boost my mages 5 times by 100% (2MMMs) plus all my units 6 times 50% HP (2UUUs) bonus so the overall boost would be 500% damage and 300% HP, while the bird only boosts 6 times 50%, so 300% damage, no HP at all. But how will my unit losses change? In the 5 easy fights my losses would be negligible without any of the boosts, while the one difficult fight is where I loose 3 squads. Boosting the easy fights gains me nearly nothing (because I can´t loose less than nothing), while boosting the difficult fight saves me troops. The difference is even more drastic, if we take into consideration the possibility to loose the difficult fight. If I lose the difficult fight, no (reasonable) amount of booster building will win the fight, but the firebird can.
So bottom line, if I have the free choice of both options I would take the second bird.
For the average Joe the answer may be different of course, but for them other things will probably be far more important than this completely hypothetical question. But undoubtedly spending diamonds on MA flipping will definitely increase tourney scores for everybody, no matter what
