Yes it's been fixed, before, the more you upgraded SS the harder tournaments were, Now they "fixed" it so that instead, the more you upgrade ANYTHING else, tournaments cost you MUCH more, same "difficulty", higher cost. Dont they realize, the difficulty has never been winning the damn battles, its always been the ability to raise enough troops or produce enough resources.
Now you research your planks tech to upgrade your factories to make more planks right? that should help you in tournaments, but no, because now they ask you for more planks than before, then you got to upgrade your houses to have more workers for your factories, that will cost you more planks too, its just damn ridiculous
Consider this, I can do spire all the way to the top with a barely 3rd chapter town, but i cant do it with my chapter 7 ones or else i deplete all my resources... wtf man, what kind of game makes it so much harder to achieve the same goal the more you progress... with a chapetr 3 town, 3rd level encounters cost me a dozen treants or a couple dozen archers. With a chapter 7 town, it costs you HUNDREDS and later on, THOUSANDS
So why upgrade at all, much easier to make 10 treants than 1000
The solution is quite simple. the difficulty per encounter in spire shouldnt be based on what chapters you are. Make it constant, 1st level, easy, crap prizes, low towns can do that, mid level harder, average prizes, chapters 6-9 can do level 2, then beyond, only late chapters can posssibly win level 3, for the best prizes.
This way, you actually WANT to upgrade your towns.
To really fix tournaments to stop people from farming 23452 kp PER WEEK, just cap the # of provinces you can open. Is that so hard?
But as it is, i tell you, i stopped growing all of them except my main, they're much more efficient diamond farms if i dont raise the difficulty level.
This fix only made it so that those who abused the system are now the only ones really able to push far in tournament. Easy for them, all their wonders are already at level 30+.