I'm not one for forum posts, or whining and complaining - but honestly, the Capture the Flag tourney really showcases how broken Sparta is these days.

Why do we have tournament that encourages the strongest coals to come and destroy the weaker coals, the newer coals, the poorer coals?

Within 4 hours, 6 coals have taken 152 Flags - and how many of these are 'Level 1' or 'Level 2' Flags? 0.

Level 3 Caps hit - 85

Level 4 Caps hit - 49

Level 5 Caps hit - 18

On the one hand, thats actually pretty impressive. On the other, these are all coals that have 0 chance of defending the hits from the strongest coals in Sparta. Yeah, maybe some of those downgrades are 'tactical' ones done between Unions. Maybe some of those level 3 capitals had some decent PvP returns for the solo players that hit them.

Personally, i'd estimate that maybe Sparta around 200 or so "serious" coals (by that i mean: decent member count, decent enough combined coal Off/Def, most of the coal is active) so that 75% of these sorts of coals that have been hit within 4 hours of this tourney starting. I know from my own level 5 cap, and from allies, that most likely these would have been hit within minutes of the tournament starting (2 within 2 minutes on my own proves this).

As already can be seen from the Pans, no one actually bothers to hold or upgrade them past one. Now capitals that arent held by the stronger coals are going to be put to level 5 (either before losses, or after some of these level 15 to 20 caps are hit). So then what happens, when you have maybe 10 to 15 coals that have level 20 capitals and every pan in the game being held by a few javs at level 1?

For a coal like mine, there is virtually nothing to do in Sparta: raise my cap? It'll be hit soon as it reaches level 6. Hold a pan? It'll be hit within 12 hours. Raise a pan to level 2? Hit within a couple minutes and downgraded. Add to this the constant PvP tourneys which only encourages this... My only option is become good ol' Farmer Waffle, using my Orifice-Destroying tools () to maybe waste my time on Persians/Elysian positions (which is just another way of wasting troops for negative returns). Or perhaps the odd fight to protect my sieges, a key part of Sparta these days.

Is Plarium going to do anything that at least slightly protects smaller coals, instead of having tourneys where it would less painful to pour petrol over myself and light myself on fire.