Seems that the way QI is set up strongly discourages players without QI attack boosts in their city from much participation. It takes time to set up a city and put in decorations that give attack boost. The player without boosts in their city will be at a disadvantage even then as if they are in a good guild they will be facing units with relatively high boosts by the time they have their city well set up. Also, there is a relatively small number of total donation nodes as compared to fighting nodes, which puts the players without the attack boost at another disadvantage because it is more feasible to donate than fight in this situation. So, I bet many players think there is little point to it if it takes them a week or whatever to even get to the point that they can contribute and they then have to start over before much longer. Newer cities, even with motivated players will struggle to get any QI boost in their main city for a while too.