This is an incredibly bewildering change in my eyes, especially seeing how much negative feedback this received on the beta forum. No real response to the issues, just a vague response basically stating: "trust the plan" and "you just wait, we'll give you OP defensive buildings... eventually", none of which addressed all the other concerns... and then it gets pushed into live servers 2 weeks after, with zero changes? As I said, bewildering. But let's constructively run down the topic and issues:
1) The re-orientation for defensive bonuses. This needs to be tackled first. The idea it self is not even that bad. Defensive bonuses were widely considered useless and needed to be either removed or made relevant. GE5 is a way to do it. To do it as it is now, with an massive defensive requirement curve in GE5 that is unrealistic for almost everyone to achieve at least now is... interesting? It could be done better, but as it stands, it alone isn't too bad - either ignore GE5 or try to drastically rebuild for it. This is also the most controversial point between players, and this is the aspect that has "people who loved it!" (aka people, like me I think, who would like to see some tweaking for defense). But here is the thing, GE5 change is not just addition of GE5, its also pre-packed with a lot of weird, anti-player changes in GE4, as well as the weakness of GE5's rewards (concern about which got ZERO feedback in the aforementioned response of the devs to GE5 backlash). So let's see those concerns.
2) Weakness of GE5 rewards. Most of this is word of mouth, as I am not an incredibly experienced player, but I did carefully follow the discourse on GE5. And the simple thing is, the rewards are not considered to be worth the massive cost of unlocking GE5, rebuilding to city def or trading with goods. ESPECIALLY not when the ultimate reward is a 1/4th of a subscription service to the real reward, which blows up if you don't do GE5 weekly (as a little feedback, I think it would feel way better if the last reward was fragmented and took many weeks to acquire, but was permanent). So were there any buffs to the GE5 rewards in the 2 weeks following the announcement? Nope. Nor was the issue even given acknowledgement. But again, at least you could ignore GE5 and the change wouldn't affect you further if this was the only issue for it.
3) The GE1-4 rewards were nerfed in basically every regard. First and most obviously - less diamonds. And okay, this is painful for FTP players with IA expedition worlds, but if the financial situation is bad, this can be justified. However it does not seem to consider that this will also lead to a lot less player activity as (at least this is what I will do) these farm worlds will be abandoned, or just transformed into mostly inactive Wishing Well farms. Also it should be added that GE was a great way for early players to get free diamond expansions while they were still cheap, helping them expand and get into the game better - far harder now. Secondly, the fragmentation of building rewards is a massive and absolutely uncalled for nerf to the GE rewards. It might seem some people are angry at fragments as a concept, but the real issue is that the fragments are used here to hide the fact that you are getting far less rewards. And no, the RNG removal isn't balancing it. Let me put it clear - with current fragmentation rewards, you are getting less buildings *you would want and target for in selection kits*, than if you would get RNG rewards as was before. This is not even mentioning that you are not getting the "useless" buildings, which could be traded in the Antiques Dealer, and thus be useful. And this is all so strange because these GE buildings aren't even that super powerful to begin with. Maybe its an attempt to secretly give you less FoY's, but at that point just nerf the RNG chance to get FoY's instead of messing up the whole GE reward structure. Once again, this change most of all hurts new players, who would benefit from getting more early FP producing buildings, which in the long run is better than the new increase in chest FP rewards. Oh and finally, the Renovation and One Up kit rewards are gone - hope you got your event buildings to generate them or are leveling a Temple of Relics, else your growth is hampered (once again, a nerf hurting everyone, but new players most of all).
So, to sum up the GE5 update - a new GE level that implements an okay idea in a very forced and rough way along with meh rewards, packaged along with a wide array of nerfs that for all intents and purposes suck the fun out of GE1-4, nerfs its building rewards (that weren't even that good), nerfs diamond production and removes entirely a way to acquire 1up and reno kits - all of which was already said by people smarter and more experianced at the game than me, all of whom got ignored, patronizingly grouped up into "the dinosaurs who only want attack bonuses and no defense" and of course the change then was pushed into live servers at light speeds.
