@ukman the game itself is a relief, without the need of diamonds.
It helped me to overcome anxiety due to over-working myself... I needed no diamonds, as I did not even know how to use them. People with be relieved, and happy to play the game, they will worry for diamonds in several weeks.
Maybe, as I type this, they could gift that free building, but without buying diamonds, but then, a lot of people will complain because they had to pay for it.
In my business, I do not use the word COVID-19 nor coronavirus, and I have a way for people to receive free help, and relief, totally independent of all. Maybe INNO did not want to look like they make a business out of the COVID-19, idk, it is not my business, I am a client/player.
It is complicated, I understand. We have the classic of getting players to like premium and buy in the future, but we do not know INNO's numbers. I would think that something special in the game would be nice, but they have to code that, and that takes a lot of time, especially if there is a conflict in the code... a single ";" missing can steal hours from you. Even with all the colors, and all (if you code you know). It is not fair for INNO neither to do extra work.
Do you know
what could have INNO actually done nicely? Maybe make an "I-can-say-the-name-of-the-game Day" That day, there were massive buffs.
I saw the buff that is coming due the anniversary in this game in beta. Maybe for the entire confinement, they could have boosted 200% of all our manufacturers. And maybe "accelerate" the times (1h instead of 3), building times reduced 20% for example, etc. That is fairly easy to code, and it can be recycled.
It will mean a faster building, faster building waiting time, faster scouting, and faster all. More playtime and it could be fairly easy. Another option is to make (it might be easy to change, depending on the code of this game) to make a "speedrun server", where everything is accelerated like 500%, productions are tripled, and (army as it had war), was more powerful, etc. Maybe the server lasted four months. Something like that maybe was a good idea, but maybe it is also out of INNOs possibilities, we do not know that.