I read this feeling like a junkie doped out 
The same moves forever…
Almost all games that rely on “micropayments” do this.
This is also… life (where we get paid in actual micropayments to make the same movements over and over for years).
But, yes. Why play a game that resembles the most mundane aspects of life? You’ve got me.
Still level 30 is like you’ve barely played. Level 900 is still newbie territory, in my mind. What people like about the game is doing mostly mindless stuff that encourages the desire to endlessly collect things, while chatting with friends and guildmates, and also collaborating on the things that are actually strategically challenging. If that’s not your thing (nothing wrong with that), you’re totally right to abandon early.
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Sounds like you dont have ironhawk.
Some of us are sick of the constant negative attitudes on forums. Gemsofwar is actually very generous with its premium currency.
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Oh? Was it “generous” when the devs basically removed the verses from gaps and massively reduced GAP rewards because players obviously were maximizing resource gain by using ironhawk teams?
Even now, some of the previous workarounds like waiting a minute or two to get max cursed runes doesn’t always work. Silly me, Generous means punishing players for playing the game.
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The premium currency in Gems of War is actually called cash. There used to be a premium currency called gems, it slowly devolved over the years into what other games consider event energy.
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I would respectfully disagree with this. Plenty of games have “premium currencies” ONLY obtainable via cash. Gems is not one of those games. Additionally, anything you can get with cash is obtainable without it (except a few old garbage weapons for some reason…). While cash can get you early access to certain things, or more resources than non-paying players, it doesn’t really put you at any competitive advantage.
Gems has many flaw, absolutely. But after my years of playing this game and experiencing its frustrations, I still hold that it has has never been, and still is not, pay-to-win.
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Weekly Event Leaderboards say hi.
As @Draegor mentioned, GoW is very generous with gems, and a dedicated f2p player could top a leaderboard if they saved up. Regardless, the rewards from the leaderboards also are not p2w - one orb of power? A refund of a tiny portion of the gem required to top the leaderboard? Pffffft.
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People who are VIP 10+ have been very generous with real cash and they get ignored. Don’t act like nobody pays for those “generous” helpings of “free” gems.
Well, the P2W debate has been done before, but I’d still argue against the generosity argument, especially since the last couple years.
Even ignoring multiple, repeated incidents often caused by incompetence, the overall game at least pushes heavily on a gem defecit.
Guild events alone have been terrible with multiple events running concurrently and not a single world event having an accurate point description ingame. Since the average tier buy varies, it could easily be a tier 1 during one event and be tier 4/5 next week. That assumes a full active guild and practically no messes in the fights.
Dungeons have been a minor gem sink for diamonds and jewels. After the rework, they replaced it with a freaking bathtub in comparison. People could go weeks without earning dragonite and would have to buy them. That’s before you even consider the duplicate dragon egg drops or the cursed runes which a lot of people still needed.
While the overall gems flow has not necessarily changed for normal play, it goes a lot less than it used too in terms of playing events. There are more events running in tandem with one another and more ways to spend gems.
Anyone without a proper stash built up previously and at least a semi active guild are at a major disadvantage. Especially with the devs either purposely or through forgetfulness, have drastically affected FOMO with numerous troops missing from troop pools simply because they forgot to add them. It’s very suspect when it happens multiple times in a row. If it isn’t intentional, it is at least a symptom of the overall condition of the team behind GoW.
Tldr: gems flow in at the same rate, but is vastly outpaced by more gem spending events or offers.
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You’re not wrong but… 
I’m just budgeting differently as I always have.
Right now I prioritize dragonite so I’m not spending on pets - except for LR.
My delves are fine so I don’t need gems for FAs anymore unless there’s a new kingdom.
And so on and so forth…
The trick is to figure out what to prioritize and to forget about wanting everything right away and at max.
Otherwise you’d definitely have to spend real money.
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The fun lies in getting new troops and weapons that will bring different game mechanics that will change how you play the game.
Making new teams, figuring out what works well with what ad against what.
Level 30 is basically nothing, but if you in general don’t enjoy match 3 “battle” type games, then gems of war is not for you.
But yes, there’s also a repetitive element but I think that’s true for all games. Can’t think of one that doesn’t have you repeat stuff. 
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The conceived value of the reward does not change the action of said reward. It also doesn’t change how much effort and gem expenditure has gone into these events.
I don’t know what platform you play on, but week in week out, there’s always at least a few people with some really high scores on these leaderboards.
I would love to see a F2P player that isn’t an old timer actually compete for these leaderboards more than once at the rate other people perform.
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison though - leaderboards in games like these will always be highly competitive and costly. Newer players will of course be at a disadvantage, but the buying enough tiers to get to the top of the leaderboard costs gems, a currency quite easily obtainable f2p, and is not especially rewarding.
I suppose my argument is that Gems is not P2W. I fully agree that the gems are needed for more things than in the past, and that they function as “energy,” primarily in terms of leaderboards.
Certainly paying will help you out in this game, as in 99% of f2p games, but will it make or break a “good” player? Nah.
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The rude one is you.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. There has been a huge shift the past year(s) in how “end-game” is treated, from “you can get anything by spending enough extra effort” to “you will be locked out hard unless you spend a significant amount of money”. This is mostly related to kingdom upgrade/power levels, the main progression aspect in Gems of War, it has the most influence on how “strong” you are.
To pick one example, books. You need books to get to upgrade level 20, for a bonus stat point. You need upgrade level 20 to get to power level 30, for another bonus stat point. Books are almost exclusively pay-only, there are several paid passes that contain them, there are tiered flash offers that contain them in large quantities. Whales should currently have around 5 kingdoms upgraded to 20, which is 10 extra stat points in the long run. F2P players get around 1 book each month, at the current rate it will take them around a decade just to catch up. This is eventually going to be an issue for competitive modes like Guild Wars, because a difference in 70 pay-only stat points for each troop is going to be felt.
There are other things that play into this. Not owning the paywalled weapons directly pushes end-game kingdom progression back a year. It indirectly pushes it back another year in case you still want to receive useful kingdom offers, and the willingness to address that particular design bug seems to once again have evaporated.
There was a time when players could compete in rankings. No official rankings, community driven ones, like most troops owned, most weapons fully traited, highest sum of kingdom power levels. Just for fun, and possibly bragging rights. It has died out, because by now the main factor for those rankings is money spent, which is kind of a shame. A way around that would be to also offer the paid passes for a hefty amount of the supposed “premium currency”, gems. Money is the way forward though, apparently the next holiday event will also have a paid pass tacked on, with exclusive goodies to further widen the progression gap.
This is really a topic I’d expect the community team to provide some kind of outlook for, to show where the journey is going in order to manage expectations. More precisely, in other games that care about the community I’d expect that to happen.
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Well said 
There’s absolutely been more of a push towards paying for a while now, especially with the variety of Passes. As you said, no longer is it possible for f2p players to have every troop/weapon/pet, as by the time they are all obtainable for “free,” new Pass-gated troops have arrived. One of the things I love about Gems, though, is that there has yet to be a troop impossible to obtain without cash. I wish the same was true for weapons, but at least the paywalled ones aren’t anything special.
As for kingdom progression, you are absolutely right that it has potential to be the most P2W aspect of the game should monetization continue to increase. As it stands now, the stat points gained by hardcore progression are inconsequential in terms of competition: 10, heck, even 20 extra points of health will seldom change the outcome of a PvP match late-game. Magic and attack, the stats that matter more competitively, are obviously gained much more slowly.
As it stands now, I personally don’t think the difference between hardcore progression players and casual players warrants a “P2W” label. Any game that offers non-cosmetic purchases of course gives some advantages to paying players who keep the game alive; in my mind, that does not automatically mean the game is P2W. Rather, small bonuses or early access to troops/weapons/pets keep paying players a few steps ahead of F2P players, as opposed to obviously P2W games where players spending hundreds of thousands of dollars are so absurdly overpowered that no F2P or casual player could ever dream of beating them. While the F2P market is saturated with games like that, Gems is not one of them. I hope it never will be.
TL;DR - The current advantages provided to paying players are minor, and much more fair than I’d expect for a game offering non-cosmetic IAPs. That said, should the devs continue to monetize more and more heavily, kingdom progression could theoretically become a larger barrier between paying and non-paying players.
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Really?
Did we praise and like it too much?