‘Clash Of Clans’ Clock Tower Nerf Meets Widespread Criticism, Causes Ratings Drop In Apple App Store

Supercell has recently shaken the Clash of Clans community with its massive Builder Base update. No longer confining players to a single base, the popular mobile title has experienced a revival in interest among casual gamers and avid fans alike. While the game seemed to be on the verge of undergoing a Renaissance, however, Supercell rolled out its newest balancing patch, resulting in numerous units being adjusted and the Clock Tower getting nerfed. This, of course, has been met with widespread criticism from the popular mobile title’s massive player base.

Considering that the Clock Tower is among the most useful new structures since the massive May 2017 update, the CoC community’s dislike of the recent patch has been incredibly palpable. Since the update’s rollout, Clash of Clans players became so vocal in their protest that the game’s rating in the Apple App Store has dropped to four stars, caused by the deluge of one-star reviews from players unhappy with the Clock Tower nerf. The same thing has happened in the Google Play Store, where the game continues to get buried in a wave of one-star reviews, with many gamers accusing the developer of removing the one feature that still made the game worth playing for F2P players.

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In a lot of ways, the Clash of Clans community’s dislike of the Clock Tower nerf is extremely understandable. After all, the popular structure is one of the only new additions to the game that provides overt benefits for free-to-play gamers. Over the past few years, Supercell has been broadly accused by mobile gamers as a developer that focuses its resources on paying players and neglecting its F2P gamers. Updates like the Clock Tower nerf definitely seem to confirm this.

The initial Builder Base update and the TH11 patch are great examples of Supercell’s player bias, since the best features of each update were pretty much exclusive to paying players alone. During the release of these updates, F2P players lamented that very few features were available to them, making many non-paying gamers feel like they were being brushed aside by the developer.

The Clock Tower changed all that. While the May 2017 update was still notably skewed towards paying players, the Clock Tower provided F2P players with a means to compete on somewhat even grounds against paying gamers. According to Supercell’s official announcement for the update, however, the Clock Tower has been giving way too many freebies to players, resulting in the structure’s nerf.

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“After careful consideration, we felt the Clock Tower provides too much free upgrade time. We are changing the Clock Tower cooldown from eight hours to seven hours and reducing the duration by 50 percent. We felt the Clock Tower provided progress too rapidly and that it required rebalancing to bring it in line with relative upgrade times. Reducing its cooldown will allow it to be boosted three times per day rather than two times.”

Based on the Clash of Clans community’s reaction to the Clock Tower nerf, it appears that the developer completely dropped the ball in the game’s recent update. Overall, it is not difficult to see where the disgruntled gamers are coming from. The nerfing of the structure, after all, does seem like Supercell’s way of overtly driving away F2P players once more.

Supercell has always been known to take the Clash of Clans community’s opinion in high regard. Thus, there is a good chance that the developer knows exactly how its players are reacting to the game’s Clock Tower nerf. If Supercell plays it smart, it will revive some features of the Clock Tower that it removed in the recent update.

[Featured Image by Supercell]