Quote:Naturally.
They didn't pay hundreds of dollars in support to have their advantage not count.
I'm sure there will be guilds full of players who never supported the game, of course they'd be no competition vs. those who did and were equally/more active too.
If the system were "Click here to support the game with your $$$, but the reward you buy won't apply to actual competition within the game" Then, noone would buy it. The game would be un-supported and either cease to exist or be covered with ads.
While supporting the game is a wonderful thing to do, and SHOULD give advantages (atleast in a co-op perspective), adding competition-based features that requires P2W will end up killing this game, as it did on countless others.
I don't care if someone spends 1k$+ on the game and has major advantage over me, I will still be able to enjoy it, as I am not a competition freak for the leaderboards and generally those people are pretty nice and won't mind giving a hand in challenges and what not.
On the other hand, even if I am not a competition freak, having a Player vs Player feature that takes into account the amount of money spent and which gives rewards based on that (basically : more money spent = more damage in GvG = more war won on week maximum battle number = (lots) more rewards) would basically turn this game into another P2W fest. And while P2W fests are nice for a while on the developper wallet side, generally you end up with a decaying community until what's left of the playerbase is the cashing playerbase, with less and less new players coming in to eventually replace quitting cashers.
I find the balance at this moment to be quite nice, the game obviously suggest paying, but at the same time you can see some progress as a F2P player (and generally a part of the F2P players end up paying to support/get a little bit of advantage when they really enjoy the game), while adding PvP / GvG or any other competition mode that rewards paying would leave a bad taste and make potential future supporters just nope out because they know they can never be on par with the bigger whales (while in a co-op perspective this does not matter as much, but people tend to get edgy in PvP environments)
Also, I have cashed in the past in different games that were more of a cash grab than this, sometimes too much to be worth mentionning, and I try to look at things from both point of views. I am currently a free player on this game, and enjoy it, even if the card pack thing is a bit on the limit for me. Still playable though and enjoyable, where PvP or GvG based on player DPS would not be.
My 2 cents and humble opinion, I have seen too many games get hungrier for money and turn from "awesome and refreshing game" to "avoid this p2w mess" in reviews, and then ending up dying / living off their few whales that still cash in. I hope this one remain sane and keep the balance in mind.