you mean when the game was a real game ? i hated gvg when it was brought in and they cut our attack bonus down from 5% per level to just 3% which gave the advantage to defences in the hoods, can you believe that was how we got our points was fighting hoods only ? then gvg came along and all the mass cheating that followed, now we have arcs and 1.9 threads, how i wish they would get rid of these monsters and make players play the game again, every guild is the same now just gb boosting which never ends, fighting or trying to win a pvp tower to prove your a champ has long gone, as you can just set up your own fights and points in gvg. i still play the old way try to win all the pvp towers which players laugh at me for playing that way or even attacking the hoods but its how i loved this game many years ago and players from those years will remember just how simple this game was back then and the only cheating that was going on was push accounts. can inno start the game all over again without arcs give us the simple game that it once was ? or maybe i am just a dinosaur.
Honestly, having also played Elvenar, aka: FoE's watered-down fantasy re-skined clone, I can safely say that FoE gets it right with adding in more and more hilariously OP/game-breaking elements.
At least in FoE, every single brand new player has the same oppertunity to gain the game altering building like Arc + CF, building up Zeus/CoA/CdM right away, etc... if a new player puts in the effort, they can easily 'hang with the big boys' in the top guilds as equally contributing members, since GB's aren't tech-locked away for months/years worth of researching.
On the other hand, in Elvenar, their versions of GB's are all tech-locked, so for example, only 2/11 total military focused GB's are unlockable within the first 5 chapters!
(finishing Ch.6 unlocks a 3rd, but the rest don't begin unlocking until the end of Ch.8, so basically, your military is 'uber nerfed for 8/16 chapters of the game - enjoy!
)
Imagine if FoE functioned similarly, and players needed to complete, (ie: 100% finish ALL research), BA + IA + EMA + HMA + LMA just to unlock access to the 3 staple military GB's? Most guilds would become "Colonial and above only" membership, simply so that lower players wouldn't 'drag them down' in things like the GE/GbG's/GvG.
And on the opposite end of things, newer players would literally never be able to come close to catching up to what older players can manage, which would only ensure that they lose interest in the game that much faster and quit.
Basically, the game is better if it sticks to the '40k design prinicple' of, "if everything is overpowered, then nothing really is."