you do realize that even though they are giving us some vouchers and then lifting the cao so we can rebuild what they took away ..only for them to repeat it again down the track..we will rebuild they will then nerf the daylights out of them again ..never ending cycle of bait and remove
What, that's the pessimistic view (which doesn't necessarily make it wrong, of course) but one could also take a more optimistic one (which equally doesn't make it right), and that's that there is actually a master plan that will all make sense once it's all in place, and the present difficulties are largely the result of its being released piecemeal.
Before all the furore erupted over GB changes and GvG, it seemed to me that quite a lot of discontent that was being expressed in this forum was directly or indirectly the result of people who had been playing this game long enough to have reached the end of the tech tree and the campaign map and the development of their cities (before anyone gets hold of the wrong end of the stick, let me hasten to add that I'm not blaming such people for anything or saying anything's their fault).
This created two discontented sets of players: those who had basically finished all the FoE had to offer and now had nothing else to do except to pile up resources and PvP, and those who found themselves in the same neighbourhoods as these end-of-line players who felt they were being preyed upon by players whose power they could not hope to match (only a problem if they were plundered, of course). It may be there weren't actually all that many people in that position, but it seemed to be a complaint that came up more than once (possibly due to unfair neighbourhood merging as much as anything else).
Now, the only way to resolve this problem in the long-term (other than encouraging the end-of-line players to leave, which doesn't sound the greatest strategy) is to give them something else to do. Adding new ages is clearly one such thing, although one problem is that people who have been stuck at the end of the line for a long time are likely to be able to zip through any new age so fast that the new age doesn't alleviate their problem for long. Another solution might be to give them something quite different to do, and here GvG might fit the bill. Many of the complaints against it have been that it requires vast amounts of resources and thus threatens to slow development to a halt, and that only the top guilds can realistically competer. Well, maybe, just maybe, that's actually the main idea, meaning that maybe GvG is principally intended as a new challenge for end-of-line players who don't need to develop any further and who might be looking for something different to do.
Possibly (and now I am speculating wildly) this may have something to do with why the ME GvG map wasn't released along with all the rest. For that to be the case suggests that the ME map might be qualitatively different in some way, and not just more of the same (otherwise, why the delay in releasing it?). One such difference may be that it's somehow a much larger map (perhaps subdivided in some way to allow for memory constraints) which allows far more scope for guilds with end-of-line players to compete over a longer term without reaching a stalemate as soon as the first few most powerful guilds stake an unassailable claim to the limited territory available. Of course I don't
know that this is what's planned; I'm just suggesting it might make more sense of GvG if it were.
Going back to the GBs, supposing that these could be advanced beyond level 10 using sets of duplicate BPs (which still seems quite a good idea to me), then this would provide a further opportunity for end-of-line players to advance somewhat. Suppose, say, it was realistic for some GBs to reach Level 16, then a Level 16 Zeus, Aachen or del Monte would give about the same attack boost as their pre-balanced versions would. In such a scenario the rebalancing down to 3% boost per level would make a little more sense, otherwise this additional levelling up could result in grotesquely overpowered GBs. (Of course some will object that this would be making people work harder to get back what's been taken away from them, but if the objective is to allow more scope for end-of-line players to develop, then one could at least make the case that the long-term gain is worth the short-term pain).
Moreover, if the attack and defense GBs could potentially reach Level 16 (say), then the perceived imbalance of allowing watchfires to remain giving 4% might be greatly alleviated. Compared with Level 16 GBs they might even seem to come back into balance, as might what is currently perceived as an over-correction of the imbalance between attack and defence in favour of defence.
I repeat that of course I don't know that any of this is what's actually going to happen; I'm just pointing out that on a more optimistic point of view one
could see the current changes as part of a larger scheme that actually will make coherent sense once all the pieces are in place.
Whether it's a good idea to release such a scheme piecemeal while keeping everyone in the dark about the wider picture is another matter.
