I'll just say for the record, I also had CoC installed for a few weeks at the behest of a friend of mine, and felt like I barely got any time playing with it. You say the beginning is the busiest time, but I was hit with wait timers quite literally within minutes. Unless you want to blow through your consumables, I don't think you can even get a straight 30-minute run at it from the time you start playing. The thing is, this guy isn't alone in his concerns, far from it. He isn't moaning because he's a grumpy old fool, he's concerned about how free-to-play is affecting the industry as a whole, as are many people. Whether you like the game or not, the plain fact is it's been built with a far stronger focus on taking your money than on enjoyment, which is absolutely the wrong way to go about creating any game. Developer greed (and I don't mean all of you, Rubicon, if you're watching) is leaking into titles that just don't suit the free-to-play formula at all, and we appear to be heading into rather a depressing era for gaming. Alright, so you like CoC, but surely you must admit that not all games could work in the same way? Would you enjoy GTA if it used the same formula? Gears of War? Half-Life? We can only hope we never have to find out, which is really the essence of what the article is about. If CoC had been built as a premium RTS something like Command & Conquer, it could have been fantastic, but it wasn't. Let's give other games the chance to be fantastic instead of holding them back by forcing their gameplay to work around a strict payment scheme. Free-to-play has its place, but it needs to know where that place is and stay there.
