I didn't know it was pay-to-win at first. I just installed the game from the app store and started playing it. It was somewhat fun. Turns out performing repetitive tasks in order to increase a bunch of numbers in a database can be enjoyable if you hide that fact behind some nice drawings.

Eventually I made some friends and joined a group of players. We started battling other people and winning. We got so excited we started buying stuff. We rose to the top pretty quickly. I was among the best. It's a nice feeling. It wasn't even that hard to keep this up, I just had to spend a few dollars a month for some items.

At some point casual players got tired of losing to us and quit the game. Eventually, the population of my server got so low they merged it with another one. This introduced more strong players into the server, making it harder to compete. It wasn't so easy to stay on top anymore. I started spending more money but I wasn't able to keep up with the best players.

Then they merged servers again and I realized I'd have to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month just to keep up with them. That's when I stopped playing. It doesn't matter how much I spend, someone is always going to spend more.