Design Challenges Update - We Want Your Feedback

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:

• Last for more than 24 hours, especially given how lame Mondays are.
• Receive better compensation.  For example the first vote round offered could provide blueprints, encouraging everyone to vote at least one round.
• An overhaul to who gets voted on, for example the more a mayor votes on others the more votes they’d be weighted to receive.
• More than one overall round of voting so above average and exceptional entries get more views and opportunity to shine.  For example Monday is the same, then Tuesday voting between cities only with 3 stars or more with no loss of points.

Hmmm.  attached is my entry for green valley which got, unbelievably, 4 stars.  I thought the max was 3.5!

I did notice during voting that all cities I saw had 2, 2.5, 3 or 3.5 stars as an average rating.  In general, the better entries were people with 3.5 stars so obviously the ones who try.  But where are the cities on 0 to 1.5 stars?  some of the rubbish I saw was only worth that and so many people submit junk.  More importantly, where are the players with 4-star average, bearing in mind 4 stars are needed to reach the end?  I need to win this week or get 'double blueprints', or get a handout if I am to get to the simcash.

I suspect the voting does work in a way, the rubbish cities do get lower points and the better cities get higher but the spread seems to be 2 to 3.5 stars not 0 to 5 stars.  I have suggested other options (elimination so only the better ones gain more viewings and stars, group the cities into 10 chunks based on the voting, lowest chunk gets 0 stars, highest 4.5 stars (winner gets 5)) or they can even just apply a multiplier - double the distance people are from 2.5 stars (range would then be 1/1.5 to 4.5 which is better).  Whatever, the voting needs to change, or the event track.

Like the idea of votes getting blueprints as rewards.  Encourages voting and will allow people to make up the shortfall in entries / stars.

Also agree voting shold not be on a Monday or Tuesday.  It was only done that way to align with Com and see below for what people think of that!  Do design Monday - Thursday, vote Friday.  Design tasks not to appear in com!

Has anyone else noticed that the last three Design Challenge winners all now have a 0.0 average star rating?

How could this be if they each won their challenges with 5.0 stars? Could this mean that we competed without the chance of winning against a developer city? Hmm...Just wondering. 

Also, I am curious  as to how many mayors actually take the time to vote? Personally, I try and vote through at least a dozen queues each round (I set a timer when I can ), but given the current payout,  I doubt many others do.

The Design Challenge concept is actually pretty cool, but I believe it should be separate from CoM; If not, we'll keep seeing and having to vote on cities with 66% happiness and zero thought put into their design simply because mayors are getting a CoM payout of x-amount of Plumbob Points for submitting a design. (This is comparable to our ongoing problem with war assignments in CoM. Mayors will start a war locking a couple dozen people into a war simply because they want x-amount of Plumbob Points for launching two war attacks, then they walk away. BOR-ing!)

Just mho.

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Our opinions and suggestions are so important that for all the time there is not a single official answer.

I think there will be no changes for a long time.