I think the lack of activity on these forums compared to the olden days says something about the state of the game. It's obviously worse off than five years ago which was worse than five years before etc. But the p2w garbage in every world has killed .net for me forever.
I'm a returning player, I was never very good but I played at high ranks a few times at various stages of worlds, with reasonable success. I came back last month because I was bored and joined w119 11 days late. Even after screwing up the startup because I'd never heard of scavenging before, by day nine I still plundered more in one day than the then rank 2 player (and current rank 1 by a mile) had plundered in any of their 20 days on the world. He had nine villages and could still barely crack 100k loot in a day which is just embarrassing, higher farming competition or not.
The next day I was harassed out of the server by a nearby pp abuser. I was hitting critical mass and just needed a couple more days before fighting, but the many obvious instances of rampant pp abuse (eg about 20 squares away someone nobled on his second day) makes that unlikely, so I'm not going to play here anymore. Even if I do get the start up I need, it will all be for naught whenever some imbecile decides to buy a skirmish victory in any of the many possible ways.
I'm sure we've all experienced something similar, although your opinion may depend on whether you were the abusee or abuser. In any case, my solution is to move to .de, where they release a non-p2w world every couple of months. And that's where I'm going to stay until that server goes the same way as .net. And then I'm going to quit, which is what it seems like most top players have done here already. It's a great pity, because the core of the game really is great. But it's hard to argue that this "strategy" game isn't dying when money >>>>>> strategy.
