Informations

Four answers given, in terms of gems, time, market value, and personal utility.

This is probably the most important question any player of this game is going to face. Whether or not it is "worth it" in your situation will be 100% personal, although if you are going to spend money, you should unquestionably start with a Gold Pass before anything else. Yes, even before a builder hut deal!

For everyone who is not sure whether they want to spend any money on this game at all but are considering it, or for those who are already paying for the Gold Pass but questioning the true value, here is a detailed analysis of the value of a Gold Pass from two different in-game perspectives and two out-game perspectives.

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Table of contents: (use the "find" command to operate this table)
(i) Nominal Gem Valuation
(ii) Rate of Game Progression Valuation
(iii) Collectible Market Valuation
(iv) Personal Utility Valuation
(v) Conclusion

(i) Nominal Gem Valuation

First, a simple consideration of how many gems the Gold Pass is ostensibly worth. May 2020, the pass provides the following rewards:

How did I arrive at those values for the boosts? Here is how:

Season bank:

20 million gold, 20 million elixir, 200k Dark Elixir. Note, you do not count the loot you would get anyway if you didn't pay for a Gold Pass.

Using these calculations for the best possible rate of gemming resources gives us 35,000 gold or elixir per gem, and 36 dark elixir per gem. Using this rate produces gem values of 5715 for gold, 5715 for elixir, and 5556 for dark elixir, or a grand total of 16,984 gems!

Builder Boost:

20% reduced build time means you get an extra 6 builder hours per day. That might seem confusing, but it works like this:

24 hours in a day, so a normal account gets 24 hours per builder.

A Gold account can complete 24 hours of building in only 19.2 hours, leaving 4.8 hours of free builder time!

4.8 hours of builder time, but with 20% reduced timers can be filled with 6 hours of normal account build time!

Thus, a 20% reduction in building timers actually results in a 25% increase in how much you can actually build in a month!

Of course, there aren't enough season challenges to get to 20% builder boost until the first day of the third week. Meanwhile, you can get to 15% boost almost immediately, so we'll use 17.5% as the weighted estimate.

In the month of May, there are 744 hours, so 17.5% build time reduction equates to about 158 hours per builder, so 316-948 hours of timer reduction depending on how many builders you have.

Using the same calculations as before provides a timer reduction estimate of about 6 gems per hour, which comes out to about 1900-5700 gems! That's only the first portion of the value of this boost!