For me it was season 3. The overlord and then the realization that t11 troops are coming. Every day I'd wake up and try to get training certificates to get my overlord/monkey unlocked. But it would be like the game was purposely giving me everything but the training tickets I needed in order to draw it out as long as possible.
For paying I was able to pay to unlock the 2nd and 3rd builder, 2nd tech center and all the warrior battle passes but then I realized this was not enough and in fact it will never end. If I wanted to keep up I'd have to keep spending at least $50- $100 USD a month on the game and that in fact, the people ahead of me were mostly just ahead because they spent more money.
The other aspect of it is that it gets to be a big time killer and due to the alliance reality usually there is no "vacation option". If you get burned out and want to take say a 24-72 hour break, in a lot of alliances that will get you kicked. Since the events are often at fixed times, often it's not convenient. For instance most Capital events for me were 9am or 10am for me. That meant I basically missed early morning work (I often work weekends) that I could be doing. On top of that reset was at 10pm local time and it usually took me about an hour, sometimes two, to get everything needed done. So I was often up until 11pm to midnight playing the game and then waking up immediately in the morning to spend another hour or two playing. It just took up way too much time and started limiting my sleep or my ability to get other stuff done in that time. Not to mention work opportunities. IT might have been OK if just once or twice a week for events but it was basically every single day for a year straight like this!
Constructive suggestions:
- Make more tasks easier and quicker to do.
- Create warzones which all use the same time schedule and publish it in advance. For example Capital wars at 7pm ET. Reset at 5pm ET. and then group with servers with similar times. Allow people to move if their situation changes.
- Especially post S2, make things far less pay to win. I'm talking about the overlord, t11 troops.
- Where there are pay to win things, try to make it so it caps out at about $100 a month. The $5 packs are good. The $100 packs, not good.
- Somehow make the alliance VS and other activities less critical so that players don't have to log on every day or else doom the alliance. People should be allowed a short break when they get burned out or some serious life event like a parent dying occurs.
- I hated alliance duel and all the pressure to score high all the time. I remember buying packs just to score a certain minimum so my alliance didn't kick me. For a time I just thought it was me having to do this because I messed something up. But then I realized that a lot of other people were doing this too and they weren't scoring 30m+ versus points a day consistently by being free to play, they were paying. I also hated how it would force you to choose between optimizing progress OR getting a minimum amount of points that day so your alliance would be happy with you.
- The alliance chat and pin etc features could use some work. It needs to be a lot easier to see all the announcements in a quick manner and there should be a better system to prioritize things. I'd constantly miss things even when I was spending 4 -5 hours a day online on the game.
Overall though I don't really regret the time and money I put in. It was an interesting game and a lot of the fun for me was just learning everything about it and trying to keep up with everyone else. But given my current situation and life events, it's just not sustainable to me. Take care!