This is all about Inno's capitalism. Nothing is by accident or without forethought. Whether or not they are right in the assumptions they are making remains to be seen, but it all comes down to a single goal of increasing revenue. They believe they are taking the best possible route to achieving this.
Step 1 - Put mechanisms in place to greatly inflate the rewards people can receive from tournaments (i.e. Fire Phoenix, Brown Bear, freely available combat buildings). Let this run for a year or more. This is the seed planted.
Step 2 - Take the extra rewards in step 1 away again, only from the people that received them in the first place. This can't be done, of course, in such a crude way as by removing all the bears and phoenixes. So we have a new tournament calculation that has the same effect. As someone who has played the last three tournament weeks steadfastly only playing within the confines of what is sustainable I can tell you that my tournament average is frighteningly similar to how it was before those buildings existed. This isn't an accident.
The idea with the above is that you have a big group of established players who are all used to getting a certain reward. The plan here is to make these people do all they can to achieve what they have done for the past year, first by burning through accrued resources and then by spending money.
Step 3 - Put another mechanism in place to greatly inflate the rewards given to newer players and those who otherwise did not see the bonuses from step one. This is wrapped up in the same process as above by designing the new tournament calculation to make it now incredibly easy for these people to score comparatively vastly more than they did previously. This is a new seed planted to bring the next base of players into a situation where they're earning much bigger rewards than they did before.
Step 4 - Take the extra rewards from step 3 away from the new group of players. This happens when they eventually hit the progression wall and the hope is that these people now start spending all the diamonds in order to keep up with the progression curve they have been used to.
So the last two steps are exactly the same as the first two. To make it simpler they could have just taken all the bears, phoenixes and combat buildings away from group A and just given them to group B, ready to repeat that process again in another year's time, but of course they don't want to be that transparent.
Inno will be 100% led by what increases their revenue the most. Asking for our feedback has very little consequence other than, perhaps, for a little fine tuning and getting the information back on how it is working. The only way that any of this will ever change is if their plan doesn't work and they don't make more money, or if the money they are making reduces.
As a small group of forum users we probably can't have much, or any, impact on this. If people start to spend less money than before then they may want to change their plan, wholesale. If there is no tangible effect on revenue then they may start to be more receptive to players' thoughts and ideas. What we don't know, however, is how the 99% of players who never visit these forums are reacting. It's quite likely that they're all burning through their resources and then starting to throw more in-game purchases in, here and there, in order to maintain their previous levels, unaware of the futility of that. Perhaps they believe that the increased difficulty is a short term anomaly. I, for one, will just continue to play within the confines of what they are offering. If I choose to spend any money it won't be because of tournament rewards reducing.
As a final thought, I would be interested to know whether the group of players who are affected by steps 3 and 4 above have now been given an increased likelihood of receiving combat buildings to craft. I wouldn't be surprised at all, but we will probably never figure it out for sure.
