Yep. It's arrived. And from a design point of view, it's ugly and intrusive. If the prompts to buy were more subtle, I'd have shrugged it off.
But, jeez, it's right in yer face.
Another "But": I do confess, as I started a late smithy build tonight, it had a certain appeal. You don't question the inconsistency of the argument that 'it will be cheaper if you spend more money' when you are desperate to get your build levels up. And there it is, right there, the carrot of quicker gratification dangling in front of you.
I can understand Inno's motives on this. If I may use an analogy: Some (OK, many) years ago, we had an arcade game in our local bar. People would put their money in, get zonked after a few minutes, then either pay again, or leave it vacant for another punter. Some of us got quite good at it. Eventually, 3, maybe 4 of us would take it in turns to outdo each other. You could be on that thing for 45 minutes at a time, for the one initial slot fee. Income off the machine must have been minimal when we were going hard at each other. When noobs played, income would have inevitably gone up.
Also, I know that if we could have paid a higher slot fee to bypass or shorten the easy initial levels, we would have done so.
Analogy over. It's a basic economic argument here. I don't like it, I'm not condoning it, but it's inescapable. Encouraging impulse buying is where it's at, and the strategy and design of the system only encourages that. You all say "TW is dying". Inno will have a better grasp of the figures than any of us - if they think this might save the game, good luck to them. Equally, if they're just milking the last dregs out of a failing model (like record companies do with 'greatest hits' albums), then they're only doing what comes naturally.
Just don't appeal to their love of the game. They don't have any. It's an income stream, that's all. And when/if it fails, they'll wrap it up and move on to something else. At the end of the day, all of us are nothing more than data in a server.