I do understand. Attack boost will become less valuable. I agree. As I said, just as passive FP/Goods production used to be king but was replaced by Attack, now Attack will be replaced by something else.
I also believe this will be a positive change for game balance as a whole, as I explained before; it will hurt top players (maybe the top 5-10%), but will help or otherwise not affect everyone else (the other 90-95%).
The rewards are still there; everybody still does GE, many people still do GvG, even though the rewards are much smaller. SoH & Elephant are still excellent buildings, and 100-200 battles per day is still enough fp to boost daily income considerably.
Guilds will be forced to consolidate; small guilds with low numbers of high-power players will no longer be able to maintain diamond league, as they will be outpaced by large guilds of less advanced players. This will encourage guilds to merge and increase teamwork within the game. Impacts of this will probably be felt even in GvG - larger guilds, larger battles, less of the ghosting nonsense that happens on many competitive GvG servers.
People may spend less, but they were definitely willing to spend diamonds before. There was no GbG when someone bought enough diamonds to get nearly 20 full Pirate Ships in a summer event a few years back. There was no GbG when my guild leader in 2017 professed they were "working overtime to pay for more Fire Pagoas in the spring event." Furthermore, Inno must know that this will reduce diamond expenditure; and the fact that they're willing to test it anyway demonstrates that they believe it is good for game balance, despite the inevitable loss of income.
As for me personally, how it will affect me has very little to do with how I view the change. But since you keep bringing it up, here's how this change will affect me:
I'm in a top guild in my world; we maintain first in GvG, we win nearly every GbG season, we only have a handful of silver GE medals and no bronze. My guild will continue to build maximum SCs regardless; this change will not affect that.
My biggest issue currently is that I there are never any fights left; I don't have the time in my life to sit and wait hours for sectors to open, to be on constantly; I only get fights in when I happen to log on and see a sector opening within 5 minutes. I, and many other players like me who cannot be on for hours on end, will not be hurt, and in fact many will benefit from these changes.
This change will hurt many of the players in my guild who do thousands of battles each season. Might the game lose players because of that? Possibly, but we're not going to dissolve, and other players will step up to join their place. We will still play the game.
The rewards of being in Diamond GbG, while not as broken as they currently are, will be large and desirable. Therefore, because GbG battles will cap at a few hundred per player, larger guilds with many players will be more desirable. Larger guilds with more people contributing to treasury & map control will then be able to provide the battles for their members, allowing for players to maximize their (capped, but still present) rewards. Players will gravitate towards these larger guilds or will fail to gain the rewards.
In my server, my guild is one of maybe five guilds that can consistently run GvG at a high level, and we're constantly at war with two of the others simultaneously. The rest of the guilds combined (beyond these 5ish) can't hope to reach the fighting power to challenge the top five. While a one-man guild can participate in GvG, they can't really hope to provide a real challenge to large guilds. Honestly, GvG is getting annoying when the daily routine is "Alright, make sure nobody landed and broke our shadow in AA... now wipe those smaller guilds that did manage to land... now take whatever we can in goods maps because 6 guilds with 10 people each are ghosting us... anything else? no, ok great gj team thanks." I'm personally hoping this change will encourage larger guilds to form which will provide more interesting wars in GvG.
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So yeah, this change will change the game. Who'da thunk that changes would change things. It's a nerf to the current top strategy, which will understandably piss off many top players, but just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it's unbalanced. The rest of the players probably won't care, and many of them might even benefit. The game will continue, a new top strategy will be found, and people will abuse that for a while until inno nerfs it. Wash, rinse, repeat.
