Trapping your Exposed Townhall: The Consequences

A common tactic to protect your resources is to leave your townhall exposed and out of reach of your defenses so that someone will come along and kill it for the trophies.  This lets them have a win and you keep your valuable resources.  Another common strategy is for people to put all their traps, bombs, and hidden teslas around the townhall so that they can get either a cheap defense or to cost their opponent valuable resources for attacking the townhall.  An example of this type of strategy is posted below:

I am here to implore people to be reasonable in using this strategy for the benefit of the entire supercell community.  Below crystal 3, anyone who drops a troop on a trapped townhall will more than likely quit if they don't want to waste the resources overcoming your teslas.  This will allow you to get the cheap defense and they can keep their army.  Once people get into crystal, the loot bonus is worth overcoming the teslas, especially as you climb into master.  There is virtually no chance you will defend with your bombs and teslas only at the masters level.

With this in mind, I will explain why you should not use this strategy.  First, if the attacking party is superior to your base, often times they will destroy your base as punishment even though they only wanted your townhall.  This will cost you resources.  You won't have any of your traps, bombs, or teslas helping to defend and you will have to rearm everything.  The second and most important reason not to trap your townhall at higher levels is this:  Every win that someone achieves adds resources to the game.  The added resources improve the economy and allow you to be offered better loot when you are attacking.  Trapping your townhall will cause the enemy to waste elixir which will be eliminated from the available economy forever.  When a barbarian king kills your townhall in master 3, the global economy gains 100,000 gold and elixir.  By trapping your townhall and requiring them to use a larger portion of their army, you are decreasing that amount exponentially.  In summary, trapping your townhall lowers the global economy and you will earn less money on raids.