EA Staff (Retired)The voting system is all wrong. People who did the bare minimum are getting the same rating and people that spent a lot of time making their entry look nice. Over 3 rounds of voting (15 total votes), I did not see one design that I though deserved anything more than 2 stars. Making us choose between 2 bad designs forces us to reward mediocracy. Voting for a design simply because it's better than the alternative, diminishes the work of people who really made an effort. It would be much better if we were able to rank designs on their own.
My other major criticism is that there's nothing to enforce the theme. The winning design in the first challenge, while it looked nice, had a mishmash of buildings that didn't fit the theme. Adding goals to the challenge that revolve around the theme would help. For example, a goal that rewarded us for only using Tokyo residences might have helped.
As it stands, there's no real incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum.
In General it's a nice idea, i like designing the city. BUT:
- i don't agree with the fact, that I get 3 stars (from whom??) after spending 2 days of hard work designing east city with almost 1 mio population. There must be some awards depending on population and services provided.
- why do we have to vote for designs with 1 simple street and 3 houses? There should be "0 stars" button for all those "designs". For now we have to chose between bad and very bad.
- the most important thing. CoM. Not sure if developers have actually played SimCity, but we like playing CoM. I purchase premium CoM-Pass each season. This week started with 2500-points-Task "Design Voting". How can I vote, if CoM starts on Wednesday and voting on next Sunday? After I canceled this task, I had an "upgrade task" in design contest. So how is it theoretically possible to upgrade, if we already submitted our design and voting has started?
Af the end, I made 10k less then #1 in my league, 152k for 73 tasks (2 canceled).
If you don't remove design tasks in CoM that will be my last premium CoM pass and I'm sure all the crazy CoM-players will stop compete as well.
- by the way it's very complicated, that we can't see club chat and can't visit neighbors straight from the design map. If I need couple of hammers I need to leave the map, ask for it in the chat, wait until someone reacts and go back? Is it so complicated to let us have the club chat directly on the map?
thank you. And please change it.
