EA will you consider making this game enjoyable again
We will start with the new layout of SCBI. The right-hand side of the screen is cluttered with groping ideals of the persistent money grab by EA. Please reduce these annoying icons flashing on and off the screen and reduce this layout by putting all of these into a "fly-out" menu, just as you have done with the construction theme in the lower right. IE roads, commercial stores, factories, services and specializations and housing
The icons in the lower left, mayors contest, regional selection, chat, war and city album are simply too big and do not fit a relational size of the other, many icons on our screens. Our screens now have 15 icons and 3 fly-out menus. What a cluttered mess. Please clean this up. If you play this game on a tablet that is 8-12 inches in size these icons and their layout is enormous and taking away from our valuable real estate to display this game.
Surely by now, after over 15 years, EA's development team would have found a way to display this game on different devices. Detecting the device on which someone plays and displaying the game layout in relation with the screen size of the detected device is not that difficult.
Next, we will bring up the seasonal currencies. This new idea of seasonal currency is nothing more than a distraction to the main idea of EA's advertisement for this game: "Build your dream city". There are now 14 different currencies in this game. What direction do you want us to go with this? We all know that doing something simple and doing it the best you can is better than doing a lot of things half-way. The only items worth purchasing with the new seasonal currencies are the speed up tokens. But then again how many of these tokens does one need? We have enough Epic Project tokens, and factory speed up tokens are rarely needed, if you plan ahead. So, what is the point of these new currencies? Right now, if you access the calendar icon and then the Costa Rica Shop three out of ten properties are available so that we could purchase. There are others but they cost real money or Simcash (which leads to spending more money) and lastly the speed up tokens. We certainly do understand that this would help a new player develop their cities. But for us veteran players these are not needed.
Let's talk about the new reminder red dots. As seasoned players do you really think that we need to be reminded of the things that we need to accomplish in order to move our cities forward? Get a clue development team - we already are aware of what is going on in our cities. Food for thought here, just maybe we do not want to perform the action you are trying to remind us of. Have you ever thought about that? Yet we have to deal with a distraction by showing us red dots because you think we have forgotten. Somehow, someway you may think that we are distracted or limited in our ways of thinking, planning and we need the help? We have seen the opposite; the players are smarter than the development team.
Next trains: we did develop trains in our regional city: Green Valley. But we wanted to see how we could do without spending any real dollars. After 705 days, we can report to you that we are no further ahead than the first month. The relationship to upgrading a higher-level train is based on what you have done with a lower-level train. And this means that you need to upgrade in a per-determined order to move ahead. The free train cards you receive every day is not based on randomization as the gaming team will tell you. We have kept track of these once-per-day tickets and the higher-level train tickets are running at about 2% of the aggregate amount. That would be 705 x .02 = 15 train tickets for SC Line 2001, in almost two years. In order to upgrade SC Line 2001, you would have first to upgrade another train to level 3 which is based on another train being at level 3 which is based on another train being at level 3. The only way around this is to spend real dollars to move this forward. We hope you are seeing the point of all this.
Another bone-head idea is this indexing of mountain and beach specialization. Since we have been playing for over 10 years - we as players from the start never had to deal with this index. If a player had the resources to buy there were no constraints, we just simply bought what we could afford with our gaming resources. Fast forward 8 years and now there are these ropes to follow. We feel sorry for the starting new players that have to deal with this and as seasoned players we did not. Seems a little bit discriminatory towards the new players. We can only guess that EA did this because it was too easy to upgrade mountain and beach properties and they saw this as another avenue to get players to spend money.
Everything new that EA has introduced the last several years is based on spending real dollars and making this game harder to play, thus taking out the enjoyment to play. Remember the first SimCity? You purchased that application once and it ran forever without having to spend any more money. And the enjoyment of having played the original game far exceeded the fun of the current version - SCBI.
Let us say one thing - we do understand the more success a mayor has the harder the game should be. We do agree with that, but harder and impossible are two different worlds. One can make the impossible come true by spending real money and that is the real sad part of this equation. EA has certainly made this a pay-to-play game.
We can only hope that someday EA will realize that getting enjoyment out of playing a game is more important to the players. If the game is frustrating for someone to play - then why play it in the first place. Why do we still play you would ask - we are hoping for change, to get back to the original ideals of once where this game came from.
ElwinAmigo
