Didn't have time to read all the comments, but the game in its current state has a VERY limited shelf-life. If they keep going the way they are going, it will be dead within a year. I have seen it with countless games like this over the years. Countless content-creators like myself have tried to warn them, but they don't listen.
The biggest issue (which ties directly into what you brought up here in this thread) is the fact that Plarium has made this game 99.9% about who spends the most money. It has VERY little to do with skill. It has to do with who bought enough shards and energy to have the champions and artifacts to be the best of the best.
The current dilemma is that there are enough people out there willing to spend hundreds or even thousands per month on this app to the point where Plarium doesn't care about those who won't. So, they are milking those whales for all they can. In that process, people like yourself see this, get discouraged, and leave. This will only last so long until that bubble bursts though...
What is eventually going to happen at some point is that the game will be predominantly whales, the whales will realize this, and they will start to drop like flies when they realize that paying thousands doesn't give them any competitive advantage at all, but is actually simply necessary to be average!!! When things get to that point, the whales will stop the influx of money, and THEN Plarium will be forced to drop their prices or walk away from the app. Hopefully, they will drop prices at that point, which will gradually cause new players to stick with the game more and bring retention up.
What kills this game for me more than anything is the fact that "the best" in the game are not "the best" because of skills, but because they were willing to spend thousands on an app when others knew better (no offense, but that is VERY wasteful imo). After I realized that unless I spend thousands, I can never be a "top-tier player," I immediately cut back my spending. There's no point. There's nothing to brag about in the least bit when all you did was waste more money on pixels. If anything, that should be embarrassing, as you clearly have an addiction at that point.
IF Plarium ever starts paying attention to their retention rather than just gross profits, they'll see the issue they are going to encounter in the near future. They also seem unable to grasp the concept that they can't treat this app like they treat their casinos. Sure, rip someone off at a casino, their addiction will drive them back there. Gamers DO NOT tend to come back after they have been burned. They should've learned this from the Foli incident, but instead, they did the absolute bare minimum at that point to solve that specific problem, but not the bigger issue that Foli was merely a small piece of.
Time will tell if they are going to ruin this game, or make the changes necessary to save it. A lot of content creators are moving to other games though because they feel Plarium isn't listening and won't listen to the concerns. Myself included.
