Re: trade depot OVERWHELMED with Vu Tower items!?
pgsharpe,
Interesting thread to say the least. My opinion is that EA is trying to deplete the gamer’s resources to entice the player to spend real dollars on this game. The real deception here is their greed....
10 million plus downloads, 1-2 percent (or higher) of those people spending real dollars, say 5 or 10 bucks adds up to a lot of dollars for EA. You can tweak these numbers either way and it’s still millions for EA. If this is not the case then we shall see that in the "proof" and that is to fix this "freemium game" or a rebuttal reply from EA.
One thing I can offer is that raising Simoleans is not the real problem. I currently have: 1,203,000 Simoleans at level 34. But I have no place to spend my Simoleans in order to grow my city. At the Global Trade Headquarters? That's a joke.
This leaves me in a position of accomplishing just one thing: raising SImoleans, which is not the true intent of the game. The real intent of course is to grow your city. And to grow the city is where the problem lies. The GTHQ, City Expansion, Disaster Challenges and even upgrading buildings in the later stages of the game are all road blocks to being a successful Mayor.
Upgrading buildings is one point I want to make. Is the algorithm that generates the requirements for building upgrades flawed or did the programmers do this on purpose? From a business stand point: who would use an enormous amount of resources just to upgrade a building? You can sell them for much more. (that's how I got to over 1 mil Simoleans)
One could argue that "that's the way it is" - well remember when we all started out playing this game? Where you could upgrade a building for 3 Nails, 1 Seed and 1 Plank (total value $390) and receive these rewards: 1836 Sims, $868.00, Experience points 29? Great: we are on the road to success. But after having played this game for several months, level 34 uses 3-5 times the resource/value/amount - just to get the same amount of new Sims, a little more cash and experience points. This poor commerce plan started several levels ago and is EA’s way of resource depletion.
It is literally impossible to purchase items needed to increase city storage and city size even though I have enough Simoleans. They simply are not listed at GTHQ. While on this subject…. How is it that 66 items needed to grow a city do not show up at the GTHQ? It lists only 24 and most of them are duplicates. Throw in the competition of millions of players and the chances of purchasing anything useful are very slim. This is nothing more than pure frustration for the game player that might tempt them to spend real money.
Sim balloons are now very limited (above level 28???) and mostly give you; as you have stated and most have seen, Vu's items. So trying to wait out the very slow process of being given these items is another frustrating aspect of this game. Road blocks you bet that’s the real game plan.
So it seems that EA does not need to tweak the GTHQ to make it better; they need to scrap the idea totally and come up with something that gives the game players the ability to purchase these items without this frustration. A sense of satisfaction needs to be had by all players, a sense of accomplishment or EA’s philosophy of making money off a free game will not work. People will eventually walk away and play a different game.
This is really silly that we should have to complain in this way because this game could be fun, gratifying, give us a sense of control in order to accomplish building a society, a successful city in a way where everyone seems happy (Sims approval).
nw8240bp
