Ever heard of crowd effect? I bet most people in that huge player base you mention don't even know what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Level freeze indeed has it benefits like you will get higher chance to get into top 3 sage depend on your spending level and your resource management skill. Also, matsuri.

However like I said, level freezing is not for everyone, especially f2p and small p2p. You lose more than you gain most of the time.

How many months you think it would take for an average joe to not only catch up to top 9 players in his sage bracket let alone surpass some of them to be in top 9? To catch up with these people in sage you need to spend more than them, spend wiser than them or just out right use 3rd party tool to cheat because as you moving forward in power, they also move forward and with a faster speed than you if you r not spending.

Then let talk about Matsuri, there are guides to give you higher chance to get 5 wins in matsuri without level freezing but I'm lazy so I won't write it down here. I want to talk about disadvantage a freeze level will encounter in this event. When you meet a higher level oppoenent you will get sub stats penalty which mean you will be a lot weaker than them even tho both of you on the same power. You can ask any veteran player who has decent knowledge about the game mechanic and they will tell you the same thing.

That disadvantage from matsuri will carry over to space time and other events like TG and GNW. Also just take a second to think, if you freeze level but a random guy at lv 95-105 are gaining equal if not more resources than you, will it still worth?

So conclusion, before anyone start to freeze, they should be prepare a solid spending plan and money to make it worth the risk else don't even bother. However if you start the game in a fresh space time cluster then freezing may be a good idea but currently? Nah.

But hey, as a level freezer it's actually a good thing for us if new people keep freezing in our sage bracket blindly hoping for a day they can beat us. They will refill our sage bracket so we won't get merge with higher bracket and these players will be food for the whales and long time freezers.

The system gives privilege to higher level and power.

If available an high power level 105 that hits the 60 seconds of waiting time because had none else to be matched with at comparable or higher power at the same level will be always matched with you if you freeze.

So if you are experiencing this means your bracket is new and the amount of 105 is very limited (so people like me simply don't exist in your bracket, but, don't worry, sooner or later they will exist).

Just to tell you, i am around 280/290k power right now at level 105.

What happens is that 90% of the times i hit the 60 seconds mark of waiting time because i don't find matches (after the first two wins the system simply ignores whover has less than a +10% power at your same level, since there's no higher level than 105, so i wouldn't hit the 60 seconds mark if and only if during that specific time frame joins the queue somebody at 320-350k power that LOST the previous battle).

At that point or i get matched with a level 105 400k+ that was waiting since more than 60 seconds like me (20% of the times) or i meet somebody like you (80% of the time).

This is what will happen to your bracket too if a lot of you freeze, because generally the big whales don't freeze, nor do freeze the low cashers (like me) that have no chance to be top2 in swb (or at least they cease to do it once they cease to be 1st or 2nd. 3rd place for us is not appealing, i don't understand why people talks about top3. Only 1st and 2nd matter, the difference between 3rd and 4th-8th is close to 0 over 1 month).

That said, capping sun scrolls is easy and doesn't require at all to win more than 3 times in matsuri and getting 2 more ss in a week doesn't change your game life.

Unless you are willing to spend good amount of $$$, then there is little advantage anymore to level freezing.

1) There are easier ways to get adv refine runes now (and in much higher quantities).

2) There is little net sun coin gain from level freezing. You can get ~1000 more sun coins from top 3 in SWB (you will have to be an active killing machine which means $$$), and ~100 more sun coins from matsuri (the last 2 wins only give 100). over a week this is ~3200 sun coins. But, you give up sun coins from cat quiz, jin rescue, and 9tails rescue, which is about 2400 sun coins (3000 if you can get top 3 in 9tails). This puts your advantage in sun coins to ~200 sun coins. Getting sun coins used to be a hard thing to do for f2p at a high level, but with ninja outburst and arena matsuri, it is very easy now to max out your sun coins.

3) There is little advantage in Matsuri, as the pool of players you face around your level is very small. You will mostly be fighting 90-105 level players anyway after 1 win (and sometimes before).

There are really only 3 good reasons to level freeze now.

1) Time, you can skip events, which means less time needed to put into the game every day. And not playing for a couple days won't be as big an impact on your standing.

2) Struggles with beating Strong Approaching/Matsuri. If you have raced up in level too fast (say level 80-85 and power <50k), then you might want to level freeze for a little while to strengthen up a bit.

3) You have already been level freezing and you are a 200k power player whose favorite part of the game is dominating SWB.

Many players here have said many good arguably reasons about Freezing.

I used to freeze and then I partially stopped.

You only need to sweep to meet event requirements.

I don't do 9 Tails, but I participate other events like Rescue and Cats but don't take experience, only take the secondary prizes.

I believe F2P needs to earn power-up materials as much as they can. Otherwise you won't be able to keep up.

You WILL NEVER gap close to those who pay, no matter how long you are going to freeze.

You can freeze entire 3 months just to get that 1400 adv refine. But 1 paid player top-up 2 events can anticipate what you're after. [Example only.]

I've exponentially raised my stats and power over time, but then this guy is out of nowhere recharged for the first Madara [Ten Tail] events full month and he's now Rank 1 in our merged server, whereas before I used to beat him. Now i barely scratched his shield.

Level freeze or don't. it's really your call.

Yes delaying the grind does give you an edge but if you're in an older server there will always be a p2w level freezer that vastly out-powers you... in fact as a few have said 9+ in most tiers, but that still isn't a bad thing, actually while you're at it why not WOF farm, all you have to do is not play for weeks at a time and reap the benefits now that sun and moon scrolls allow the classic freeze items to be bought. Figure if you cycle freeze and wof farming from lvl 32 on a fresh server it'll take approx 8 months to hit lvl 85 and if the farmed resources are used appropriately you can easily grind power with virtually no effort out of intentionally doing everything you can to not progress the game. Done proper you will still be in the zabuza arc once you actually start playing again, which in turn is where the rubber-banding begins. you will never be toppest kek but you can abuse this to farm coupons, scrolls, sun n moon mats indefinitely, with 40k coupons you can get both shisui and jounin minato (or shisui + anbu itachi @32k)

Or alternatively you can just play, communicate with other players, have fun with the community and even have fun hazing players... I mean this is supposed to be an mmo d@mnit it's not just a min max spreadsheet, this is supposed to be a game you play not a game that doubles as an accounting career.

But alas you be you, if you derive joy out of ev and iv training pokemon for the perfect stats for months... even years then you should participate in freezing, if your the type that just picked up the latest title to enjoy a campaign and maybe casual battles with friends dont freeze. Either way theres hundreds that do whichever path you take that can help you or even become a new friend.

With training grounds, and rogue ninja being added, getting max sun coins each week is easy. I skip most Mats (I usually do 1 a week and stop at three wins) and all nine tails and still get too 5k no probs. The only reason to level freeze is adv refines, it's still a good reason to do it though if you use it to get top three consistently in SWB.

Can confirm on the wait time ones, i've seen people at level 60 with 50k after being queued for 2 minutes, with me being a maxed level 300k player.

I've never been an advocate of the level freezing life style, and as time goes on I see less and less reason to encourage a new player to start such, at least the hard freezer way. As the game progressed the main value of the freeze, being Sage world, stopped being the only path to high refines, which means winning big in the events go from a need to a nice bonus. The issue comes mainly with the hard freezer path, being that one gives up huge amounts of resource potential in order to get such without such. Generally, with how much experience needed to level, not doing plots after the last orb should be the only thing done, since you can still take months to level without it, and gain the mountains of other mats during said time, being thousands of magatama, and what is valued around 3000 coupons worth of sun and moon shop items a week.

Its a personal preference thing at this point, but its no longer that hot secret for a f2p to make big headways anymore, really groceries killed that concept a long while ago.

Indeed and now refinements are both in group shop and in monthly event.

Actually monthly event change made way less appealing than before the level freeze option because for two weeks out of 4 the daily mission there are to sweep up to 60 plot and elite instances.

If you level freeze now you are skipping them that are 80 points a day for 14 days: 1120 points means 25 less advanced refinements during those two weeks. The difference between being 3rd in top swb field and being 4th-8th is 4/5 refinements. So now being 4th/8th without freezing and being 3rd every time while freezing became comparable outcomes for at least half of the month.