Hrm, I'm assuming you've accrued more gems than that..right? Under less than 3 months of play time, I've gotten 500gems (spent on 3rd builder) and an additional 537 right now - without reaching crystal league -, totaling all the gems I've earned at 1037. 656 gems in 6 months seems overly stretched, unless you forgot to add in the 500 gems there. But that would still make your total at 1156 gems overall in 6 months, which still seems little compared to your play time and mine. Anyways, just an interesting tidbit I noticed.
Of course, the 5th builder costs considerably more and may encourage IAPs, but I haven't even given it a thought to purchase gems period just for an extra builder. Not an issue at all there. And yes, surely I do have other games, work, activities to do within the 4-5 days that I am waiting for an upgrade. You come off as assuming I look at my iPad religiously for the 4-5 days - the satirical comment/questionaire were incredibly unnecessary.
I'll see how bad this paywall is when I hit th7, thanks for the heads up.
Correct, I should have clarified that that was not taking into account the 500 I used to buy the third builder. So in total if you count those, I have had in my possession 1156 as you stated. You get gems from either clearing the trees/trash that pop once every 8 hrs and achievements. Drop rate was really low from clearing. They have increased it after the holiday update and now you can even get up to 6 gems per clear, when rarely you saw clears above 3 gems. Plus you get them more frequently now. So I guess that should help a tiny little bit now. In addition to that you get more gems from achievements but the big gem rewards are in late game. So you can go a few weeks without seeing any achievement reward. Again my original point been, when I commented on the gems responding to a specific post, that you are not likely to get enough gems to buy the 4th and 5th builder in a timely manner w/o IAP.
You have to take into consideration the context of my answer. That particular answer you quoted me from, was addressing the point that the game experience eventually devolves into exactly what you are describing. ***You put some upgrades to work, log in 20 secs to collect resources, maybe one raid and then repeat again 6~8 hrs later until upgrade is done, rinse and repeat. My comment was directed at people commenting on me saying how raiding is not a cost/time efficient activity to do continuously. One, because the returns are not high and two because it does take time if you want to sit down and raid more than once... Oooorrr you could speed up troops production with gems which you buy with IAP. *Keep in mind I'm only talking about the efficiency of raiding, not how fun it is or not.
Some people perhaps took it personally and thought I was attacking them for the fact that they enjoy the game. Not at all, if that's what you enjoy then more power to you. Im not judging anyone, hell I love League of Legends and to some people that is just beyond bunkers. All I did was say that the game has a pretty glaring and imo disgusting pay wall (unless you dont mind the game experienced previously mentioned above***) and went on to state why and the details behind my reasoning. Someone can read my post and say, "hey, you know what? I agree with him so I wont waste my time with this game" or they can say, "I dont mind that at all" and go ahead and pick up the game.
*And as an additional note, raiding is fun in this game. One of my issues is exactly that. They effectively take away that part of the experience later down the road. The further you progress in the game, the less raiding you'll do, because the timers of your raiding parties / spells become longer as you level up and as you need to change to higher tier troops in order to successfully raid. When I sit down to play a game, I actually want to sit down and play the game. Not spend 3 mins playing, then waiting 20+min to play again etc etc. Plus of course everything else I stated before.
