'No Prize' in Mayer's challenge is quite not fair.

All you have to do is save yourself all the work and money and effort by not playing for one week and you will downgrade 1 level.

It is pretty unfair to get nothing for placing 51st that's for sure. That is a lot of time and work to get nothing in return.

Yes, I've been languishing in megalopolis for some weeks, always hitting what I call the "sour spot". I may or may not get above level 7, a shot at a medium prize at least, but always fall down to somewhere between 12 and 25. And that's the same prize as # 50.

So now I'm aiming for the "sweet spot" - # 49.

After hearing about the COM exploit, and not knowing if EA cares or not, I can't help but watch the 1 - 3 players who shoot up to 95K - 100K in a day and wonder if they're using the exploit.

Well, I did't get demoted from City league last week, and I'm not playing this week, so here's hoping I get demoted.

The thing that's killed it for me is the assignments.  I have a fully-developed City, with 2.2m population and just 2/3 spare building plots.  Asking me to upgrade 3 Residential, or 2 London Town, buildings  might work for a lot of people, but the only way I could do that [2400/2000 points on the current challenge] is to demolish something and then start rebuilding.  Somehow that seems a bit perverse!

As to those who seem to zoom to the top of the Leaderboard with huge scores in no time at all, I really do wonder how they do it 'honestly'.

As long as you have one spare place you should be able to do upgrade residential/tokyo/london/paris zones missions. Just start a new building in the empty spot, no need to have full coverage of all services. Then upgrade the building which should be easy (i.e. just one special item) then you demolish the building. Repeat. (this didn't work a couple of weeks ago if I remember correctly)Disclaimer: this works for me on lvl 29, might be different on higher levels. see my guide http://answers.ea.com/t5/SimCity-BuildIt-Strategies/Being-competetive-in-Mayors-League-without-spending-real-money/m-p/5389133#U5389133

If you have no space at all then you can demolish the cheapest service building (unhappy sims) and thereby getting enough space to start a new building. Start new building, upgrade, demolish, repeat, rebuild service building (sims are happy again). Expensive, but makes the mission doable.  Disclaimer: I have never had a full city so I haven't tested this. But it should work. If you try it please let me know.

/Brian

I take your point, and indeed I have done that in the past.  

What is this exploit?  No wonder I can't get anywhere. 

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@Arcadia0426 wrote:

Yes, I've been languishing in megalopolis for some weeks, always hitting what I call the "sour spot". I may or may not get above level 7, a shot at a medium prize at least, but always fall down to somewhere between 12 and 25. And that's the same prize as # 50.

So now I'm aiming for the "sweet spot" - # 49.

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Aaaa, me too! And here I'm thinking how unique is my solution to this problem -- once I noticed what for whatever I had been doing I was not getting far up from my 20th place, I decided to aim for the 49th instead -- saves me a lot of nerves!