First off, after having been destroyed on server 4 by Sion, months and months, hundreds of hours, and way too much farming 5npcs, I switched over to server 52 with some of my fellow Iunctus folks just to feel at least a little bit like I wasn't starting over alone. I had fun on 4, loved the people, and enjoyed even the end of days fighting enemies here and there where they'd win some, I'd win some. It felt fair...equal...fun. But when one Sion guy was able to take out 8 of my cities within a few hours, something was drastically wrong. Even though I fought back with 100k+ archers, pikes, and my army of 6k ballistas that I had been using to farm, things just didn't work out. Not even being reinforced by the friends I had made over the past few months made a difference. Teleporting whatever I had left over to a different location only postponed my total destruction by others in the area I had landed.
A month or two after the switch to a new server, 52, after having built up a nice army of ballistas and transporters so I could farm more 5npcs in hopes of building a nice archer army to farm medals, a brick wall was hit. There appear to be very few medals on server 52. What would take a few days of farming to nab enough medals to finally build a 3rd city...then later a 4th, ect ect, it was clear that the medal drop rate on server 52 was totally nurfed. I'm sorry but not being able to find a single rose medal dropped by a valley when using 8 heros and 20k archers in my search is flat out stupid and angering. For christ's sake, I fought harder to find one Rose medal than I did to find the 10 Justice medials I needed for my tenth city on server 4!
Why nurf medal drop rates? Simple....if they keep offering all of these crazy "cents" bonus plans in an effort to sucker you into buying cents with the hopes of getting rewarded medal boxes or enough cents to buy your own medals, more people will buy into the game instead of just playing as is. Not a problem for me to chew on this, as I understand the business motivations behind it, but the reality is that I am not going to drop $20 here and $20 there to get medals...if I'm goingt o plop out $40 I'll buy a real, non-web based game...one where some jackball with nothing to do in the middle of the night won't he able to steal my hard work.
Back in the old days of server 4, I'd occasionally lose a city to someone and eventually take a city from someone else. Again, as ruthless as it seemed, it always seemed fair. With enough time and energy put into the game, losing one city and still having 6-7 others to work with made that loss not nearly as painful as a loss on server 52....where the hopes of getting 6-7 cities, due to the nurfed medal drop rate, just seems so remotely out of the question (unless you drop real money and...in essense...cheat your way to power by using real world money to influence the game). Losing your second city on 52, where you're lucky to have 2 and there's slim chance of you getting a 3rd due to drop rates, is like lopping off an arm and leg and asking you to still try to kickbox.
The final straw happened last night. After having my main taken by BIA the other day and teleporting out with enough food and 500 ballistas to start farming in my new landing zone, I set out to do just that. I made 6 5npcs and began building more ballistas for farming. Off to bed I went and when I woke up, the second city I had been creating, getting ready to abandon for yet another 5npc to farm when I woke up in the morning, was the only city I had left. Another BIA swept in while I slept and took my remaining big city, leaving me with just one dummy city contianing absolutely nothing except a level 1 rally point.
I now am left with two opitions...start over for the 3rd time since joining the game in May 2009, wasting hundreds of hours staying up late to build and upgrade, checking things when I get up before work and when I come home for lunch, and lugging my Macbook everywhere in hopes somewhere I'll be able to find wi-fi and ensure I'm maximizing my time by always building something (building, army, farming)...or call this quits for good out of pure frustration...
I think I just need to find a new game that isn't such a time sink and isn't ripe for bullies to pray on your hard work when you happen to be asleep at 3am. Evony friends, it's been nice knowing you. Evony enemies, I hate you all. Evony itself, thanks...but no thanks.
-Nerdnology