The game was never on a level playing field for everyone. People with or without PA are proof of that. The amount of people I know that managed to get to end game with a decently positioned, large account without using PP at all are far and few between.
Skill and strategy never reigned supreme, they were important, but if you've been playing since EN8, you've seen the massive accounts. You've been subject to 100K+ commands/day operations. At mid and end game, available time reigned supreme.
True, but when you get to that point I feel its fair to spend money. You're essentially buying convenience and management features of the game. Not game items.
Like I said previously, I'm not against spending money on the game. I used a premium account back on world 8 because I found it was a good value for what it gave you, and it wasn't P2W.
As for time available, isn't that true of nearly every game? The more time you put into it, the higher return you'll get out. TW is no different.
You can NOT take out the MasterCard and directly pay for a bigger army. Early game you can obviously get your village up faster and gain a head advantage, but by the time you have a couple villages you get diminishing returns. If you even get that far. Apart from some unusual cases, one player can not indefinitely play alone without need for a tribe, PP or not.
There is not such a number of PP abusers that they can completely overtake everyone else during early game.
Early game resources are in short supply. You can buy resources with money, and use those resources to build troops and establish dominance in an area. I agree that it seems a lot of the P2W stuff is early game, but early game is important. Getting a head start and owning the area directly around you is an excellent way to grow. The more you grow, the more likely you are to get into a strong tribe and proceed to mid-game.
The Premium Exchange is not designed to be abused like this and serves a better purpose. You can sell resources for PP indeed, and purchase them for PP. The real reason people can do this is because it allows them to gather PP to purchase a Premium Account without having to spend real money, some people are not strong enough financially to do that.
With this argument you sound like the people years ago who were complaining about the first T-trains that had no ms gap implemented. "Sending attacks becomes how good is my connection and how consistent are my lag spikes," which was a far more valid argument than this.
Some people like the P2W stuff, I get that. I get that the game needs a revenue stream to support itself or it would die. My argument is that there are different (better, imo) ways to monetize your game rather than the path TW chose to go down. Path of Exile did F2P very well, and I think over the years I've dropped 6-700$ on that game because I enjoyed it so much despite it being F2P.
I don't particularly like the PP features myself, nor do I usually go through the trouble of preparing for (ab)using them. However, without them, I can see TW dying very fast. A bunch of players do like them and Inno wants to keep making money on this game and, lets face it, when they stop making money off of it, it's going to get shut down.
My suggestion would be to have classic worlds without the P2W, but instead monetized via some sort of subscription fee. Either you could buy it directly, or use PP farmed on other worlds, etc. In this manner, you have a game without the P2W elements, but still offers revenue to IG. Just copy the anniversary TW classic server and charge people for it.
