Global Trade Building - Poor Experience

EA & SCBI Dev Team.

First I’d like to say Thank You for making this mobile game. In my free time I fire it up and enjoy some peaceful sessions of creativity. I’ve enjoyed the game enough to spend some money on a Premium Mayors Pass, and little more to expand my available railroad trains.

I wanted to bring to your attention a negative game play experience I’ve been having. When I reached level 15 and unlocked “Beach Specialization”, I immediately noticed that Global Trade started showing me predominately beach expansion items. I continued to level up 16,17, and now 18 and I’m still noticing the same thing. Out of the 20 slots available every 30 seconds, I’ve been seeing 17-20 slots all contain beach expansion items. 

I’ve been in the position of needing some basics like nails, or seeds, and I feel I have to spend an inordinate amount of time continuing to check every 30 seconds, sometimes waiting for the timer to expire and manually clicking refresh to see the same large amount of beach expansion items. I’m sure it’s also a positive thing if there’s a game mechanic that keeps me in the game longer, but I won’t knock it for that. 

I have noticed a similar post about this two months ago, and a community answer was given about promotions and giveaways causing an influx of goods into the trade market, which I can understand. I imagine fixing or addressed something like this is extremely tricky since there’s a whole economy to consider. Rather than just give feedback, I’d like to give a suggestion:

Each of the 20 slots I see at any one time is a city, with that item listed for sale. It’s extremely convenient when the item I need is showing in one of the 20 slots before opening the sellers city to finalize purchase. If I need nails, I’m tapping on multiple slots containing beach expansion items in hopes that they have other items for sale that happen to be what I need. What could be a great way around all this could be if:

Each of the 20 slots I see have a large square box containing their highlighted good they’ve marked as “on sale for 12 hours” and that box would have three smaller squares on the left, and three smaller squares on the right containing icons of other items that city has for sale. This way it’s totally fine if they want to highlight and even sell boatloads of beach expansion items, but since I can see previews of other stuff they have, I wouldn’t view the Global Trade as “overloaded”.

Another way to pull the above off would be if each city having their own slot, we could see their available items for sale like “fanned out playing cards”. You could make the icon or size of this the exact same size as the current one as there isn’t a need to see the entirety of the item, we can tell what wood is by just seeing a small piece of it. The main item in the center card, with one, or two cards on the left and right. You’d still be maintaining 20 slots, or 20 city listings every 30 seconds as well.

If I could open Global Trade tomorrow, and somehow see from that window “oh, but that city is also selling what I need” that would be so much better. I imagine it would also save on network resources due to players like me who currently see lots of the same items, and I have to comb through tons of cities, hoping there’s a slim chance that they have other items for sale that I need, only to find they do not, and I repeat the same task a lot. 

Taps Beach Item “let’s hope they have some nails” sellers city loads up and they don’t have anything else other than that beach item. Argh, close, next, ding ding ding, close, next, ding ding ding. 

Thanks for reading!
Mars Colony 01
Club President: The Final Frontier  
Friend Code: NGS3SH