After years of playing this game I will be quitting thanks to this new feature.
This feature will kill all PVP when people fully understand its impact which was made clear to me the other day. Defense is no longer a reasonable strategy, as I will explain later, and since PVP requires defenders for attacks to take place PVP will eventually dry up.
Initially I thought it was just another annoying feature designed to get people to spend money. Fair enough. But it was exceptionally annoying. The amount of time required to fiddle with guardians, painstakingly upgrading them, was absurd. Then the requirement to choose your guardian carefully lest you lose the rock-paper-scissors game and get hit with a -25% effect.
After a day I was hit with an attack where the other player had a +50% due to his guardian. He annihilated my small force even though I had maxed pretty much every other bonus possible. All troop level 32, resource buildings at lvl25, I mean everything, even a +10 def bonus item. Then this guy appears with a +50 guardian and bam.
To counter this my only option would seem to be to spend money to buy good guardians and then login every 2 hours to fiddle with these guardians to get them up in rank. Even then I will be restricted to some subset of possible offensive or defensive moves depending on the guardians. Even if I did this the defensive options can never guarantee superiority due to the rock-paper-scissors feature. The attacker always has the option to scout my forces and only engage when he has the advantage. This is why PVP will end. There is now a clear advantage to being the attacker and so people will not opt to defend emporia, cities or anything they don't have to.
My other option is just to use this as a good time to stop playing this game which is what I will do. Its cheaper and takes a lot less time. Why should I spend hundreds of hours in a futile attempt to get back to where I was a week ago before the rules of the game were changed?