Is there a future for KoH?

Hey guys, DeliSubs here. I've been playing the game since January as a F2P only player in Realm 10.

I'm hovering around TH 15 with ~150m might now. I've got a friendly clan, somewhat decent grind, the usual.

However, what lies in store for the future? Clearly, there is evidence of a dying player base from the repeated merges into Realm 10. You don't have to be an expert analyzer to tell that other realms are slowly dying off because of the P2W gap in their respective realms.

My main issues with the current state of KoH is not with what I'm currently at, because I'd like to think all THs levels 20 and below are the peaceful stages up until TH 23-25.

In that bracket, research can be as long as 1-3 months. Rewards for events in that tier are scrapped for everyone besides 1st to 3rd place. 4th-10th place doesn't even exist. Why is this acceptable? I'd assume people are just accepting this as the norm because they're thinking, "Oh, well that's how it is."

Not only that, TH 23-25 pretty much clearly tells all of the F2P players "Welcome to TH 23-25, please pay $XXX.XX in order to compete with anyone in the events for the prizes! " Most F2P players just stop at the 3* reward because they all know they will almost never be able to compete.

Look at Game of War. Look at Ark of War. Look at basically any kingdom builder. They've all been riddled with the P2W aspect, and the players that have not spent any decent amount of money have left because they're demoralized by the P2W gap or have been Zeroed to the point where their 3 months of progress have been reset because some guy far stronger has gone and reset him to a state where 3 months of progress was destroyed by 1-10 minutes of tapping on some dude's phone. Since it's a war game, it's expected to be Zeroed, so this argument doesn't have much hold.

New players see the strongest players and they either do one of two actions:

1: They see the massive gap after a few days/get constantly barraged during the newbie stages and leave absolutely frustrated because they don't know how to play the game defensively.

2: They manage to turtle it out, get to either the mid-game or late-game stages and realize that there's a horrendous gap between them and P2W players if they haven't already, and begin to slowly lean towards the uninstall button after some time.

My question is: What is ATA's expectation for F2P players once they've hit the late game stages? There clearly isn't any chance of competing against the P2W players when it comes to events or global events, unless the P2W players are all asleep/busy.

I cannot speak for everyone, but I firmly believe that in the current state that the game's going, KoH is going to become another generic kingdom builder run by only those with a fat wallet.

 

The main thing about this is that people can argue that F2P players can indeed rival P2W players... by maxing all upgrades and buildings in a year or two.

In that time that F2P players get to that level, I'm gonna be out. Me and many others will be LONG gone by the time that comes along. KoH is something that was almost done right, until developers/game marketers got real greedy.

(From a TH 15 standpoint)
I loved the fact that you could use time and effort to compete with other players in most events, instead of money most times. You could plan your rss and gem stockpiles and choose when to use them.

You could strategically plan out event times and send out resource gatherers in advance to prep for Resource Gathering events.

You could hoard up brew for monster slaying events, and it wouldn't even be a matter of P2W because the payouts usually evened out, even if you spent gems rushing your marches. It was all a matter of persistence and kingdom placement compared to how far a realm monster was.

You couldn't, however, compete with people during might growth or research events sometimes because of alt accounts overtaking the leaderboards on the rare chance. Happens about 1 out of 50 times per event. Not much of a problem, but annoying. You can tell that they're alts from their might count. 20m at the TH 13-15 bracket with 5m in event points? Yeaaaahh... I'm not gemming on that. That's a different thing though.

In higher levels, it all boils down to fat wallets, and less of persistence unless it's a tedious event like monster slaying, which some P2W players dont try too hard on, on that rare occasion.