I went back and looked at your Castle example because I wanted to see whether I was remembering the old system through rose-colored glasses.
I wasn't.
In fact, I think your example helped me identify more precisely what I'm concerned about.
When the Castle System launched in October 2021, level 15 was the maximum and required 1,039,500 cumulative Castle Points. Castle Points could be earned by actually playing FoE: battles and negotiations—including qualifying activity in GBG—GE, Daily Challenges, the Antiques Dealer, the daily Castle collection and other normal activity, subject to the applicable limits. Purchases could accelerate that progression dramatically.
So I'll concede your point completely. Somebody willing to spend enough money could essentially buy their way through months of Castle progression almost immediately.
But they bought speed. They didn't take away my way of playing the Castle.
I could still progress by playing the game.
Inno even extended Castle by another five levels in February 2022, moving the cumulative finish line from 1,039,500 to 5,096,500 Castle Points. It encouraged participation across different parts of FoE.
And that's the distinction I think we've been circling around.
Older FoE was certainly monetized. Whales existed. Money could always buy speed and power. But the game also gave the rest of us systems we could manipulate strategically.
We optimized special-goods production. We built Great Buildings for particular purposes. We used recurring quests with Château Frontenac. Some players spent years building Wishing Well cities that still generate Diamonds today. We traded, optimized cities, developed guilds and found interactions between systems that gave us alternatives to simply opening our wallets.
That makes your example of players leaving an event with ten copies of the newest building particularly interesting. Some undoubtedly buy them outright. But some established players can finance enormous event participation through Diamond farms they spent years building under older FoE mechanics.
Meanwhile, in Stellar, InnoGames has explicitly moved Diamond rewards out of quests and into Technologies because of balancing concerns,
particularly around Château Frontenac.
So one old player-created strategy survives and can help someone obtain ten event buildings, while another established strategy has specifically been designed around so that its advantage no longer applies to the newest age.
I'm not arguing that Inno shouldn't balance its game. I'm pointing out the direction:
strategic alternatives are increasingly being replaced by controlled progression.
And Stellar is where that becomes difficult for me to ignore.
I don't actually care that Stellar takes time. FoE has always taken time.
I care about what the additional restrictions and enormous costs are buying us in terms of actual gameplay.
Here's a real example from my current Live technology tree. One technology requires 3,240 Stellar Points. I currently have none available for it. The game offers me the missing 3,240 for
486,000 Diamonds.
That's
150 Diamonds per Stellar Point.
And the 486,000 Diamonds don't even purchase the technology. Stellar Points are only one requirement. That same technology separately requires 7,650 Void Shards, 153 Encoded Tablets and two lots of 13,500 goods.
Another technology where I was short 546 Void Shards offered those 546 for 2,730 Diamonds—exactly 5 Diamonds each.
So this isn't theoretical. Those are the prices displayed in the Live game.
The entire Stellar tree requires enormous quantities of Stellar Points, Void Shards, Encoded Tablets, goods and Forge Points. Using the demonstrated 150-Diamond rate, the Stellar Points alone have a mathematical premium value of about
18.1 million Diamonds if purchased from zero. Obviously nobody is expected to buy the entire tree that way, and I'm not pretending that's the normal cost of completing Stellar. The point is what the game itself values bypassing these progression gates at.
And that brings me to the question I think matters more than any of those numbers:
What are we progressing toward?
We already have extraordinary fighting power. Every event gives us stronger buildings. As you pointed out, some players leave events with ten or more copies.
But power creep has already overtaken the content it was supposed to help us play.
InnoGames has acknowledged this itself. Full attrition elimination in GBG led to battle farming, so attrition reduction had to be capped. GBG was subsequently changed again partly to reduce the amount of time players were spending fighting and negotiating. GE has needed additional difficulty because increasing attack and defense boosts outgrew the existing challenge.
So we get more power to overcome the game's limits, become powerful enough to overwhelm those limits, receive new limits and then get still more powerful buildings to overcome those.
Eventually,
what is another 100% attack actually for?
If I can already perform hundreds or thousands of GBG battles, making me stronger doesn't give me something new to do. It gives me the ability to perform more of the same clicks.
That's one reason GvG mattered to me. Human opponents supplied the changing difficulty. Territory, timing, guild coordination, power and prestige supplied a purpose. Becoming stronger could change what your guild was capable of accomplishing against another guild.
The territory was the reward.
It didn't require an endlessly escalating reward building to manufacture a reason to participate.
Now we've reached Stellar Age: Discovery. We have a permanent Stellar City, new resources, Missions and a new technology tree, so I'm not going to say literally nothing was added.
But those are principally
new mechanisms for progression. My question is what substantive new gameplay all that progression ultimately opens.
Stellar's new Great Building currently gives us, among other things,
more attack and defense.
Meanwhile, the broader Great Building Prestige overhaul—which is supposed to give the existing Great Building system renewed purpose—has been discussed, developed, postponed, redesigned and tested, and still hasn't reached Live. Even Stellar's new Great Building was designed with that unfinished system in mind.
So then what?
Another event?
Another stronger building?
Another 500% attack?
Another difficulty increase because we're too powerful?
Another few thousand GBG battles?
What are we building toward?
That's the part of my original concern that “money always wins” doesn't answer.
I agree with you that money wins. It always has.
But old FoE gave the player who didn't spend that money considerably more room to answer an obstacle with
strategy.
Increasingly the answer is becoming
wait or pay.
And now I think there's an even more important question:
Wait or pay for what?
Because if the destination is simply more numerical power to perform more repetitions of content we've already mastered, eventually the problem isn't whether players are willing to spend.
The problem is whether there's still enough game left to give them a reason to.
That's why I still think it's worth talking about—even if you're completely right that it's a losing battle.
Sources
Official InnoGames sources
Historical/reference material
The 486,000-Diamond Stellar Point and 2,730-Diamond Void Shard examples above are taken directly from my current Live technology tree.
