The recent updates gave people hope of defending, only for that hope to be crushed by reality. Draining is still broken, and the Brachi meta persists. The main reason is that gates continue to drain even when a defender is in the circle fighting the attacker.
In servers where defenders outnumber attackers, like 60:1 (EU1 cough cough), defending is very easy. However, in servers where the numbers difference is something like 20:40 or 20:30, it's still impossible to defend, and that's because of one dino and one strategy:
Here is the strategy:
1. Pick Brachi and equip the agility implant.
2. Find a map you like or a clan you want to target.
3. Locate a gate closest to a DV protected gate.
4. Get your entire Brachi clan equipped with agility to spam run at the enemy gate.
5. Ignore all fighting.
6. Once the gate is yours, you can use it to respawn and spam run at an enemy gate closest to yours.
7. Repeat until you own the server or time runs out.
If you don't have Brachi, you can use Para/Anky/Cent with an agility implant.
This strategy is very boring to fight and extremely effective. You'll need a massive numbers advantage to overcome it. You probably think this is a good thing since alliances can't stop it, right? Maybe, but what you have right now is a game where no one will upgrade gates or where people are constantly trading gates, which is also extremely boring.
Collecting low-yield gates feels sad. All that work for 3-6 medals? And we can't even upgrade because we'd 100% lose the gate completely.
Also, upgrading gates should require a rank, either officer or right-hand, because right now anyone can upgrade a gate. This leads to a 'spy' meta where people make alts join enemy clans and upgrade gates to take later with way less work and way more reward. This would hurt new players because no one will allow them to join clans unless they are trusted. New players would be ignored because risking having a spy upgrade a map is scary.
Being AFK draining/healing a gate is also boring. Maybe we can get something to do the AFK drain/heal like planting a flag or something, then an enemy can kill the flag if they want to take over.
So, that's what I think so far. The game feels kinda boring. Gates are starting to feel less important since they are paper and produce little fame. If the dominant clans can't upgrade, the weaker clans sure as ever won't be able to upgrade.
I still suggest having the higher-yield gates be the hardest to takeover. You will get massive rewards for attacking or defending it. Like a small clan would be able to take over a basic gate easily then bunker down and focus on defending it.