I've had this thought since TB came out and never have been able to fully rationalize it. I get that this is a fremium model game and they have to make money, but this one particular aspect bugs me. In every other part of the game through skill or some kind of tough to obtain (but free) setup you can not only fully compete it but even excel at it.
TB on the other hand has a hard pay to win block basically with platoons. Without being able to complete 4/6 it is basically not possible to clear at max rewards unless as Kyno said you just way over GP everything which largely no f2p guild can do yet. Being able to work up to a soft cap is fine, like with raids, but I'd argue this is far from a soft cap mainly because depending on character release cadence that cycle it can have significant negative impact on the results. The development cycle and release of characters should NOT impact performance to such a degree.
TB is also by and large established content and should be fully doable at max stars by the f2p crowd by now (at least the elite, which I doubt any can do without at least 3 or 4 whales/krakens). I think a happy compromise would be at least guaranteeing 3 or 4 platoons are without p2p characters/ships and then having at least 1 with p2p so we at least avoid not even being able to get the basic bonus like my guild this week with ships (and many others it sounds are in the same boat), while still allowing for a bonus to the paying crowd. The bonuses could even be tweaked a bit between lvl2 and 3 to reflect that if necessary.
In my opinion, that would be more in line with the rest of the game design.
(Side note, this jumping text box on mobile site forums is the worst thing I've ever seen, please fix it....)
