I couldn’t agree more. One potential downside of paying to play on a level playing field would be the quality of your opponents would probably go up. You would get considerably fewer players who go inactive on days four and five.

This has been suggested a million times, Bytro said "no" every one of them.

This is a great idea for us players but not Bytro as there would be no maps for big goldusers probably.

An idea would be to offer premiumusers 1 premiumgame a month that cost gold to attend and no gold can be used when map starts. If you want more games going you have to join ordinary games. This would make more become premium members and still get to keep the ordinary games. If i knew i can join a game where all paid gold to join it would be worth alot.

If a game will cost gold to join it must be atleast 5-7 days peace as otherwise members will start complain about loosing gold. An idea if a goldgame could also be that if you get eliminated you can respawn into an idle country.

not really I have only saw 2 gold users and I have joined over 200 games

The risk Bytro takes would be losing the credit card commanders all together. I mean let's be realistic. Credit card commanders use gold for an advantage against good players. How much do you think they spend when the map is full of players that only log in once a day? Probably not a lot.

A lot of good players bail out these days when they meet whales. I just did so again, five minutes ago, on day 5. I don't think they get their satisfaction from that either; we weren't even at war yet and even a twisted whale mind can't envision that as a "victory", I think? If all good players bail on whales, maybe the credit card warriors will move elsewhere, and Bytro will finally HAVE to listen to all the alternative suggestions? Maybe we could make one of those hashtag thingies about it and go viral? #BailOnWhale?

Yet there are elite players with gold accumulated from rewards who might spend it to kill the whale's troops and make him spend even more or quit. Have seen it happen.

Problem is, Bytro tells them they won the game, so we have the issue of confirmation bias. I have no idea what goes through a whale’s mind. I quit playing regular games on the 22 player maps because they weren’t challenging. I don’t engage with whales, but some of my alliances mates do. Many know they ruin the game and that’s what motivates them. Seems to me it encourages a toxic culture.

Probably depends on the situation. Whales are no fun, and yes, archiving the game at the first sight is usually a good call. Why reward Bytro for pandering to them and why ruin your stats taking them on?

If I’m on a map with solid alliance mates, I gotta test their resolve first. Lots of them make a display of using gold then hold back and wait for you to quit. When I archive the game, I regret it later. Many times I also see blatant gold use and am surprised when they quit when I come at them with a solid partner.

Two games ago, I archived a game around day 14 after spending two all nighters when I caught other players in a vulnerable position. I regretted it, but there were two of them. This last game, I had two shamelessly golden armies cross my boarder five hours before the first day change. Out of frustration, I matched both their gold, but then was very self-conscious about upsetting the balance of the game. I only built one unit on day three and didn’t upgrade any of the units I gold spammed. Once again, players called me a golder in the newspaper. I get that a lot. This time they weren’t wrong, but I tried my best to restore balance. That victory feels tainted, but I was only matching what was used against me.

Players who use so much gold are usually lousy generals, lacking skills in every aspect of the game.

Yes, I've done this on more than one occasion, but that may depend on your definition of whale.
Usually but not always. I've seen very competent gold users.

Remember everyone has their own code for when gold use is acceptable. Personally, I only use it when I see gold usage. Getting backstabbed or ganged up on is part of the game. However, I've only ever been backstabbed once and the player was pretty clumsy about it. He kinda did me a favor by doing it. I've seen good players justify gold usage because they had multiple opponents coming at them.

Yea the "well there's three of them" excuse is just weird. Retaliatory gold use is the only gold use I see as just.

BYTRO is giving out 2,750 gold per day x 365 Days per year = 1,003,750 gold per year

Plus Achievements, and Game Victory gold.

In a few months, when they pull the plug on the 2,750 Daily gold, We'll have a core group of players who've been saving and not spending,... and bus loads galore of players who rage quit on day 1 because they can't afford to do anything since they never learned how to play, just how to pay.

And I imagine this is in the hopes that those on "Gold Withdrawal" will go out and buy gold as they cope with their addiction withdrawal.

One Million Gold per year...

Save it up gents.

I agree with the sentiment of this post, and wish I could play maps where there was a guarantee of no gold use. But this is not going to happen. Bytro does not want to stigmatize gold use. They don't even want us to trash talk gold abusers. They consider that a breach of terms, and reserve the right to punish us for badmouthing (unlimited) gold use. This is why they will not create gold-free maps, even if they made as much money as regular maps... and they wouldn't make as much money. Let's be serious. Would you pay $50 to join one map?

So just suck it up, I guess.

What we need is a site that lists all the whales and a Chrome extension that automatically marks their maps so you know not to join them. This is something I would pay for.

I'd love to see a stat beside each player that says...

"This Player spend XXX amount of gold in their last 10 games."

That would be useful.

...and, it will never be there. Gold use is supposed to be as secret as it can possibly be.

As I player who tends to play this game every couple of months (I come, play for a moth and then I just leave the game and come back after 5-6 months of absence) I've realized that in a 100 players map things are slower than it used to be...

To build an army now (even though I have tons of income and almost half of North America continent) is so so slower than the last time I've played it, maybe year ago...

It seems to me like the game is now designed to be used to play with gold..

I find the opposite is true Strule. Games used to last 35-45 days, now if I can get 18-20 out of it... I'm the last active guy on the map...

With all the extra resources you get from conquering original Core territory... it sped the game up a lot. You can drop Lvl 1 Factories anywhere and if you're Commie doctrine... you're dropping fresh units onto the battlefront with your advancement...

Feels like it's completely lost its pace.

But gold is gold and BYTRO will not do anything to reduce it's use

So we got what we got.

...........................

You know it was suggested a while back that one game type that opens up should be a pay per use game, so you pay say... 10,000 to enter the game, and you can't use gold in the actual game. So BYTRO gets it's 100 x 10,000 = 1,000,000 gold for the game... but they ignored the thread. At current package prices that's approx $350. So that means they must make more than that from an average game.