I've been intensively playing this game for six years too. At the beginning it was relaxing and creative, dessigning a city of your own..... I loved the COM tasks. It was entertaining and it gave eight new beautiful buildings every six weeks. It was long enough to be able to have an intense play week and also another one more relaxed, but I could always manage to complete the season and get the buildings. That was the addicting point. But I haven't felt so good the last two years....
They've been implementing more and more sections which somehow interconnect to avoid you from completing the season. It's been increasing the difficulty continously until this game is no more playable.
When I started the game wars have already been created, but it's something separated from it. Though there are war tasks in COM they can be mostly solved with the monster issue.
Then came the dessign challenges. For me it has become very boring, and it crashed my city, because I stored all my special buildings to have them ready to be set in dessigns. Working on dessigns have now only one prize, a new building per season, or even less. The thing is sometimes that building is needed to complete a section in the city album... Another annoying creation.
But last year has been the worst:. More shops, more items, the same useless market, COM season reduced to four weeks and giving only 4 buildings, but paying the same price, trains taking space from the city and being extremely slow to upgrade, with no reward... More and more currencies. Classic event track the fourth week in season that obliges to buy something or upgrade 60 houses or more. I'm level 99 and upgrading houses becomes harder in higher levels, complicated with the big number of existing items, some of them very difficult to find or produce.
A few months ago COM tasks became extremely hard. So we pay to buy the premium pass+ to get every prize but still it requires hours and hours of hard work (for ex., producing 15 carved wood, 12 malmelade pots or so...).
It was already horrible to play. I felt like you say, stressed and pressed to enter the game and complete a task, a dessign, check an event before it ends.... It's become a torture. I've been the last two years wanting to quit it. And then EA began with this impossible-to-follow events. They put that notepad up left in the game to check multiple events, showcases, offers, missions...and they're appearing anytime in the week, so you can never control wich is about to end to decide if you buy or not or if you have made every task to get them. At the same time more and more currencies, until we arrived to last season, Egypt, and the cruelty in egyptian hospital event. Unreachable except if you spent there 200 € or more or you pass a week without sleeping, working, going out and any other thing. It was so unfair and abusive that I decided not to fight anymore for that damned hospital. It's only a digital paint in a digital app, it's nothing real. So everything in the game has lost importance for me.
The good part of this massacre that EA has done to us is that many of us will be liberated soon. Look:
I discarded fighting for the hospital.... That demoralized me, but... besides, that implied forgetting about completing the Pyramid...ok... Somehow, everything was losing importance and then, for the first time, I didn't complete the season I had already paid for!!! I didn't complete the last two or three tiers. The last classic eternal sands event helped me: 9260 plumbobs to be completed.... Who can give priority to such an absurd thing? I left it. I realized my real life is much more important than that.
I hadn't even downloaded the new update, but when it began some members of my club told me via whatsapp it was a completely bluff! I downloaded to check it and it can't be worst. It doesn't work, two currencies more, and golden tickets too as a currency to buy tasks... Impossible number of tasks, more and more events, showcases, sales, conditions: one currency for another currency for another currency.... I don't even understand it. I've opened the game and I see it so nasty I just can't stand it. It's not only a stressing and depressing torture... It's impossible to control. And no reward at all. Only one building at the final tiers for those who don't buy the premium pass, but only three more for the ones who buy it.... only if you complete tiers, of course, what I see very difficult.
Suddenly, if there is no reward, there is no addiction, so I feel free from it. I quitted last week and this update assures me not to get back to it forever.
I see you're feeling so stressed as I was since last year. In my opinion you shouldn't struggle to accept and understand this horrible update... I wish you can get free from it as I did... Best luck!
