TW in itself without pay2win options, has a lot of factors that indicate if you are going to succeed or not. Your position in the map, who your neighbours are, are you part of a tribe or not, did you join in a premade or not, early diplomacy, etc.
Some of these factors are under the players control and we can do something about those, some other's are not so even without pay2win sometimes you might not succeed ... nothing bad with this game design until now.
Then here comes pay2win features.
I don't call pay2win features, LA, PA, AM. Those IMO should have been built-in into the "free" version of the game. It's very hard, next to impossible to manage a big account (even a 100 village account) without AM.
What I mean by pay2win features are, reduced building times, reduced building cost, buying of resources on the market, buying of flags, re-rolling paladin skill books, etc ... not forget about one of the biggest pay2win features, events.
Each of these gives an unfair advantage to the player who uses those. This small unfair advantage at the start of the world grows into something big later on and TW is not one of those win-win games where everyone wins. Someone must lose and the one who loses is usually the one who is smaller.
So who is smaller?
The one who does not use pay2win for sure, so that's the one who loses.
What happens next?
These guys who after having pushed their first village using PP very hard and outgrow everyone near them, they noble a big village which "somehow" was near them and again "somehow" the attacker did not lose any troops nobling the village. Then this same guy, nobles other villages, just like this and he manages to position himself as top player on the world ... thanks to his deep pockets (and/or PP farmed on other worlds) and thanks to gifted villages (push accounts basically).
You want to hear more about what happens next?
Well next some event shows up on the game, this guy spends like 10k PP on this event while most of the players do not spend any but for sure since the support team is saying that this guy has no advantage and he is not favored to win ... I'm pretty sure that that's the truth. This guy just spent 10k PP for nothing, what an idiot right
Then Inno offers you to also buy some PP and event coins usually on every event so this guy has deep pockets right, so he must buy and so he does.
At the end, TW is a game of survival. Who makes it to the end.
TW in itself has a lot of factors (good thing it has those) and also each world has usually different settings just to put the randomness into the game so these things they create friction for the player ... so he has a hard time to make it to the end (kind of).
pay2win features instead ... reduce these frictions. The ones who spend more have no friction at all, 1 week into the game they have already won and if they keep spending like crazy and ALSO HAVE SKILL they will win.
So right now, TW is much more predictable then it was on who is going to win a world ... thanks Inno. You have done a great job at that.
Red.