I've played other games that died very quickly, like 2/3 of the players leave in a matter of weeks (see Dragon Champions, Star Wars hero collector game for examples). This AW change is going to be an epic disaster.
For starters, player bases can't stand to be lied to. Inno is absolutely lying to us about the reasoning. This is NOT to help newer player, that is such an insane claim I can't believe they actually attempted it. The SF, CC, and RR costs are VERY unreasonable. New players do NOT have these resources.
Older cities, like myself, are not going to spends 1000s of RRs to upgrade AWs.
I find it astonishing that Inno doesn't understand the player base here. This game is overwhelmingly older aged people or middle aged people who don't have a lot of time (like me). The game is easy, that is why people play. The type of person that likes expensive grinding ISNT GOING TO DO IT IN THIS GAME. This game is easy, people play because they accomplish stuff with very little effort. I realize you think you have just designed some amazing unique experience, but you haven't. I thought INNO was self aware about this, but apparently they are not. They accidently stumbled into the easy game formula without realizing it.
Monetizing this game would be very easy. Put in a diamond/cash shop to buy building skins, city managers (for like $5/month) that let you schedule settlement productions and collections so you don't have to log in every few hours, custom in game avatars, global chat usage tokens (for FS recruiting), artifact exchange at the cost of diamonds...... none of this is P2W and would raise way more money than what you think will be raised by putting AWs behind a paywall.
So stupid, so incredibly stupid. Sorry I've got nothing nice to say right now about the design and dev teams. They are about to ruin the game, and I hope they are held accountable and lose their jobs. They think they will rush this out and take a mile, weather the complaints, and then give back inches and everyone will shut up.....I guess we will see, but like I said I've seen games go from thriving to ghosttowns really quickly.
Disagree if you want, it won't take long to prove me right or wrong. Many top players will leave, the ones holding fellowships together. Newer players will leave as they realize the unreasonable costs of continued play. It will spiral from there.