This would've been a perfect opportunity to let us expand the (imo ridiculously limited) reach of services like fire stations. Instead, even when fully upgraded, you can service fewer buildings with them than before. My Green valley zone fire stations can service only four residential zones, so I somehow have to cram in an entire extra building just for one residential zone in some cases. Which means removing unique buildings (that I paid for!) and parks and making everything even more of one big clusterf... of service buildings and RZ's.
So basically we have to spent hard earned (and often paid-for, like through Mayor's passes) currencies to upgrade existing buildings - and they'll still be less effective and insufficient. I'll repeat: they expect us to waste all our savings and be worse off once we've done that. Just because they decided to randomly - and without listening to feedback - change the rules of how services work after ten years.
It's like emptying your entire savings account to renovate your house but instead you're left without a roof and windows once you're done. What sane person would think this is reasonable or a logical endeavour?
How any of this is making sense to whoever decided that things needed to be implemented this way, is beyond me. They took a potentially great idea and implemented it in the worst way imaginable.
The only good thing about this update is that we'll be able to save some space once we're done upgrading our Omega facilities (regular ones aren't going to cut it). But the costs here are astronomical and anyone who didn't delete his buildings before the update suddenly hit (hours before the new season in fact) will have a hard time collecting enough resources to cover the costs because all buildings were downgraded.
So even the potentially good part was implemented in a way that still screwed over long time players. They've basically robbed us of things we paid for. And that's where I draw the line. I won't be spending any more money until this update meets two very reasonable expectations:
- No forced re-designing of cities just to fix services that were already adequate in the past ten years, until a few days ago. If we are expected to spend resources to upgrade buildings, they should actually be better, not worse!
- Adequate compensation for lost resources. I've paid for countless Mayor passes and gotten many of those 3000 and 6000 regional currency rewards. This is stuff I paid for, it shouldn't be taken away on worthless upgrades that do nothing to improve (and in fact even worsen!) my cities.
I know this message will likely be ignored, just like all other feedback. That's fine. I'll just spend my money on other things. In time, I might lose my cities when enough other players follow. But you, as developers, will lose your jobs and you, managers, will lose your business if you don't listen to the feedback provided. Think for a moment and ask yourself: who will be worse off if we're all going to be stubborn here?
I promise you, it won't be us the players.
