EA Staff (Retired)My design scored 3.5, I've seen terrible designs in my voting quest also scoring 3.5. The winning design is not bad, but taken in the night with so much light that details were hard to see, let alone the "design".
I'm gonna stop with my design efforts because I feel getting punished for doing hard work here, and the final level price already out of reach for me. I'll get the same points for a bare minimum effort was the message to me.
The voting system is a disgrace, EA does nothing and are yet to respond to this topic.
Well my design also scored 3.5 - though I did go for a night shot (attached). I dont know how you can tell others scored 3.5 unless they told you after the voting ended: the star rating on the revealed names is their average to date, not the rating for the current image. They could have tried hard in previous rounds and given up to submit rubbish this time.
Have to confess I did see more better entries this time and the winner I can accept as better. I do think this one was a bit easier in that there was limited space and lots of wintery things to play with, helped by the game occassionally covering it with snow so even a beach would look like winter. More better entries does make it harder to score big.
Having said that, I do agree the voting and reward track are fundamentally broken. Whilst I got to the end last time, it was only with a 400 blueprint handout half way through. Without the same I wont get there this time. It looks like the same end score as last time (2600 - rising at 400 per level after half way). They do give out more (250) for a complete submission but a 4-star average is needed to reach the end and that is virtually impossible.
The key point here is success is not just down to your efforts, it is a competition. If others compete, you get less, you cant reach the end. Mayor's pass you succeed or fail on your own merits. Have a bad week and you can make it up. Contest of Mayors you are in control of the points you get but if having a bad run you can stop and start again next week. Have a good run but dont win, well others just did better, try again next week. One bad week on DC and that's it, you're finished for the season.
Voting is too subjective, whether I succeed or fail is down to the taste and likes of others, not my ability as a city designer.
Yep same here.. in one of the DCs, I designed a city with nearly 800k population with every service provided, symmetry, and balanced esthetics. In the end I got voted 3.0. Seriously? All the winning cities suck. Oh and I built the city with only 5 hours of total play time.
Green City Challenge
This time around I've entered this... Again all roads works, all sims at 100% happiness.
Like it? Give it some XP here instead since the ingame voting system seems to be corrupt...
After watching for a few weeks I’m fairly convinced the main issue with voting is the average city is only being seen twice. Bad luck is once, good luck is three times, unusually good luck for more. There’s a reason most good submissions are receiving 3.5 stars and I think this is it.
I suspect there’s two root causes: Monday is a slow day so fewer log in then anyway, and poor rewards for voting. Put together there’s lots of mayors with minimalist submissions, few mayors voting. These problems feed back on each other: why bother with a good submission if there’s nothing for it, and why bother voting if all we’re doing is judging basic submissions for peanuts.
Voting needs at least one significant change to start. Some ideas:
