Graduating from Three Kingdoms Tactics: A Farewell to Game Studios, Whales, and Broken Fairness

Today the Wanderer puts aside real-world travels to reflect on an odyssey through the virtual landscape of mobile gaming. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when international exploration ground to a halt, I picked up the mobile title Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Tactics to pass the long hours.

Battling alongside alliance comrades across sprawling digital battlefields, I pushed all the way through Season 6. Looking back, I must admit: the game was genuinely compelling only during its first two seasons (roughly five months). By Season 3, the magic had largely run its course.

Season 1: The Age of Innocence

During Season 1, the vast majority of players were complete novices. While veteran strategists also restarted on fresh servers, their roster of S-tier generals didn’t vastly outshine free-to-play rosters. As a result, matches rarely turned into hopeless massacres; instead, thousands of everyday players mobilized day and night in genuine grassroots excitement.

This was the golden window for investing hours to master tactical rules, troop mechanics, and—my personal favorite—discovering game vulnerabilities.

Season 2: Strategic Rivalry at Its Peak

By Season 2, with commanders understanding optimal setups, server-wide alliance clashes reached fever pitch. This was the most mentally demanding and physically exhausting phase, but also the most rewarding chapter of virtual warfare.

Although some wealthy players swiped credit cards for raw in-game gold, fully maxed-out (“full-red”) generals were still exceedingly rare, and certain coveted champions were hard-capped by server drop algorithms.

Crucially, top-tier forged weapons, armor, mounts, and treasures were impossible to mass-craft in Season 2. The power gulf between big spenders and low-spend tacticians remained manageable.

During this season, by fine-tuning attribute points, tactical skills, and capitalizing on troop counters, I could routinely defeat maxed-out whales with unpromoted (“white-board”) squads, sending their armies fleeing across the map. That tactical high was undoubtedly the pinnacle of my six seasons.

Enter the Commercial Studios: The Corrosion of Gameplay

From Season 3 onward, however, I ceased recommending this title to casual players in terms of either time or money.

Why? Because at this juncture, commercial “pilot studios” brazenly took over leaderboard rankings, grinding accounts 24 hours a day on behalf of wealthy patron bosses.

You were no longer clashing against a passionate human player; you were facing an industrial pilot team operating a synchronized battalion of fully maxed armies—essentially human-operated bot farms.

Worse, game publishers appeared to tacitly encourage these commercial outfits, sometimes even featuring them in community spotlights. In Season 1, studios were kept carefully hush-hush, presumably to avoid spooking newcomers.

Driven purely by cash, pilots wrote shameless disclaimers on player profiles like: “Account piloted by studio; apologies for stealing your resource tiles”—an absurd imposition on everyone else.

Hiring pilots to maintain round-the-clock advantages for paying bosses might be tolerated if kept on the field. After all, if the opposing alliance had whales, our side had them too; ultimate victory still hinged on collective alliance sacrifice.

Through Seasons 4, 5, and 6, players accumulated broader rosters. Even as a modest monthly-pass subscriber, I had assembled formidable squads and theoretically should have enjoyed richer gameplay.

The reality was the exact opposite: the further the seasons advanced, the more demoralizing it became.

Whales constantly bought newly released power-creep champions and meta skill scrolls. Ultra-rare weapon affixes made specific heroes multiple times stronger, widening the chasm between whales and budget players into an insurmountable abyss. Even with my well-tuned semi-promoted squads, fighting a fully maxed whale required throwing multiple entire armies into a meat grinder just to take down one of theirs.

Meanwhile, the rot caused by commercial studios metastasized.

To keep their paying bosses happy, studios planted numerous secondary accounts across rival alliances to infiltrate executive leadership. Rival studios quietly colluded behind closed doors, rigging war outcomes to ensure high-paying clients on both sides never suffered humiliating losses.

I repeatedly watched our coalition leadership make bafflingly foolish strategic calls at critical turning points—deliberately stalling advances by half a day so that an enemy force on the brink of total collapse could regroup and prolong the war.

Ordinary grassroots members, stripped of real decision-making influence, had their warnings ignored. Group-operated commercial syndicates systematically dismantled the thrill of organic warfare. Playing felt increasingly mechanical: logging in simply to obey dubious orders handed down by anonymous studio managers.

In contrast to Season 2’s camaraderie where everyone helped one another, later seasons saw leadership rosters constantly churning, making it impossible to distinguish genuine players from covert studio operators.

Season 6: The Final Farewell

The decisive catalyst that prompted me to graduate from the game was how backroom collusion stripped the war of all meaning.

In Season 5, our Shandong alliance partnered with neighboring Hebei against an adversary outnumbering us three to four times.

Despite overwhelming numerical odds and treacherous backstabbing from Xiliang, our two smaller alliances achieved an improbable, hard-fought victory. Though our homelands were scorched, our primary strategic goals were fulfilled, leaving the enemy coalition fuming.

Yet at season’s end, our leadership abruptly dropped a bombshell announcement: they had agreed to “peaceful coexistence” with the defeated foe, arbitrarily redistributing seasonal triumph rewards evenly across both sides based purely on raw contribution metrics.

Excuse me? What on earth?

In an already rigged ecosystem, grassroots members fought through blood and tears to secure an against-all-odds triumph, only for leadership to casually surrender the spoils to the losers?

In plain terms, the commercial pilots had completed another contract cycle and engineered a polite excuse to hand seasonal victory rewards to the opposing whales.

Although my contribution metrics easily qualified me for the top seasonal rewards, I was so disgusted that I immediately defected to roaming bandit status in protest.

To stroke the egos of rival clients, our months of tireless collective effort were discarded like garbage. The enemy’s arrogant taunts during the war were conveniently forgiven, while behind-the-lines logistics volunteers were treated like zeroes. Whales who merely sat on frontline chokepoints farming easy war merits received royal treatment.

Worst of all, ordinary rank-and-file players were blindsided at the eleventh hour. Had we known upfront, everyone would have sprinted to the frontlines to farm easy merits, rather than wasting countless hours defending vulnerable rear garrisons and patrolling boundaries.

To the studios, only full-red whales mattered; everyone else was merely cannon fodder and stepping stones.

This grotesque revelation shattered whatever lingering goodwill I had toward the game.

Without a second thought, I gifted my account to an alliance comrade, tapped the screen twice, and uninstalled the app from my phone.

I had expected it to feel like a difficult breakup; after all, I wasn’t quitting in a childish fit of rage, but from profound fatigue at systemic degradation. Yet the moment the icon disappeared, an overwhelming sense of liberation washed over me. I stepped away from artificial battlefields and instantly rediscovered the beauty of real life.