You’re not necessarily supposed to keep up. It’s not supposed to be trivial to do so. The opportunity to acquire resources is higher than the rate at which they are required, so you can do so if you invest the time. However, that’s most likely to allow newer players the opportunity to catch up, not so that you can always effortlessly keep up. Unless you’re dedicated, you shouldn’t have everything. If it only took an hour’s worth of work to fully ascend, level, and trait a troop, there wouldn’t be much point in having those systems at all, and they might as well give you the troop maxed out from the start.
And those hard decisions are what makes games interesting. If you don’t have to make decisions, then you’re not really playing, just pushing buttons for stimuli. New players have to make those decisions, and it’s in the best interests of the game and the developers to ensure that players continue to have to make those kinds of decisions in order to keep them engaged. That’s why they keep releasing new content: to keep the game interesting, to give you new things to think about, new decisions to make.
While the ascension change is one example of low-value resources increasing in value, the resource under discussion for the guild update is guild tokens. Currently, there’s no reason to keep them, and guilds should spend them immediately for the – admittedly marginal – benefits they currently provide. However, some guilds were hoarding them, in anticipation of them becoming more valuable in the future, hoping to gain an advantage over other guilds that didn’t think to do the same. That’s not behavior the dev team wants to encourage, because it gives people an advantage not for spending their resources wisely, but for speculating on future developments, or on leaked information. As @Sirrian said in another thread:
Life isn’t fair, but people generally expect the activities they create and choose to engage in to make an attempt to be fair. Having started playing the game earlier, accumulating certain resources earlier, shouldn’t give you an insurmountable advantage, where you can effortlessly keep up with new developments while a new player struggles to catch up. When traits and traitstones were introduced, older players had an advantage in collecting them because they had good teams already, but they still started with just as many traitstones as everyone else: none. A newer player can catch up or surpass an older player if they play more. Speculation is rewarded in the real world, but even in the stock market, making decisions based on insider information is considered “cheating”, and penalized.
The game doesn’t fundamentally revolve around collecting things. It doesn’t end when you have everything, and it doesn’t begin at that point either. It seems like people get too caught up in that cycle – when they don’t have everything, they feel like they can’t really play, and have to grind until they’ve maxed everything out. But once they finally do have everything, they no longer have a reason to play, and go complaining that the game has become stale, and they need new content to chase after. Rewards and progression aren’t the only reason to play. Games should fundamentally be fun, without needing a carrot to chase after. If it isn’t fun, but instead just addicting, preying on flaws in the player’s psyche, then it’s not much of a game, and not healthy for the players or the industry.
In short, players shouldn’t be penalized for making rational decisions based on currently available information, or rewarded for speculating on unknown future events, because it drives behavior that is unhealthy, and the outcome will be perceived as unfair.