Things that make you go hmmm... aka Sim Econ100.9

Great post.

Golden Keys

I’d be interested in seeing how the simoleon cost per Golden Key works out for each level increase. I’m currently level 37 and I know for a fact that when I started doing Vu challenges, I could get through 4-5 a day. At my current level, it’s around 2 a day. Even then, that’s when I keep swapping the requirements to try and get a challenge that doesn’t require a major time-pig challenge like 10 fire pits or 20 slices of pizza (hyperbolic example used to prove a point). This is exacerbated by the obvious disadvantage of Vu challenges only paying off 1 key per building repair now regardless of the demand on resources. I’m really regretting not farming keys to a ridiculous quantity back when I unlocked Vu and before EA introduced the change to the key payoff.

The lack of filters when using GTHQ

There have been numerous times when I have gone in to GTHQ with the intention of buying a specific item. Let’s say pizza as an example. While in GTHQ looking for pizza, I happen to see a fire pit for sale. I had no intention of originally buying the fire pit, but since it’s there and since it would mean I wouldn’t have to clog up my garden centre for 4 hours, nor my building supplies store for 2 hours 30 minutes making the raw materials, I buy it. Now another player who needs the fire pit because it’s an essential part of their current building upgrade/cargo ship challenge/airport mission/Vu challenge goes without. If the filter existed, I would have just clicked on “pizza” and the other person would have had a chance to buy the item.

Another flaw: I have 11 factories with 5 slots each – 55 raw material items available to be produced at once. On several occasions upon entering the GTHQ, metal and wood have taken up around 25-33% of the trade slots in my GTHQ window. There’s no way on earth I’d waste my time buying these materials at my current level/production capabilities. They’re just taking up space in my trade centre, meaning I have to spend longer looking for the thing I actually want, meaning I enter GTHQ more, meaning I’m clogging up EA’s servers for longer.  

Yeah, in my other city I'm at level 10 and farming keys right now. I have about 200, and have already bought 5 universities and 6 heliports, more than enough to cover my 18 residential zones.

There is so much more to say about the way trade works, and the 'remedies' implemented so far, but that has its own thread so I decided not to delve that deeply, though I definitely had it in mind when I titled the original post.

There are price controls, which are known to cause shortages. If prices had no upper limit, those who desperately needed one item might be able to find one at a price that wards off the opportunistic buyers.

As you already mentioned, being better able to find what you're looking for probably would result in less of that opportunistic impulse buying.

It happens to be great to be a seller tho, however rough it may be to be a buyer. You can set the price of anything at the max limit and it is guaranteed to sell, sooner or later. Nothing I advertise remains unsold for long. Of course, we can only sell things for coin, not for keys or sim cash, and not for real cash.

I have no problem with them trying to profit from their creation. I've bought every SimCity game since SC3000. If some things cost more simcash than I'll ever earn in the game, oh well. If they want to offer 'pay to cheat' conveniences, I don't care as long as I can still get there. But it would be unconscionable, imho, to nerf vital aspects of gameplay to try to raise some extra cash off of people's impatience. I hope they're not actually doing that, tho the evidence seems to indicate that they might. I'm more likely to spend money on games that stay fun to play, tho.

More than a couple times, I've gone to a city to find the advertised item gone, but upon reloading the city's trade depot find it there. If I were a suspicious gamer with dev experience, I might suspect a glitch in the algorithm that prevents me from shopping successfully too often. 😉

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@UncleSim69 wrote:

More than a couple times, I've gone to a city to find the advertised item gone, but upon reloading the city's trade depot find it there. If I were a suspicious gamer with dev experience, I might suspect a glitch in the algorithm that prevents me from shopping successfully too often. 😉

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It may be that the player is posting additional items for sale.  When I try to buy things and find empty trade depots, I often refresh to see what else the player might be listing, and it is not uncommon for the player to list additional sales items within a few moments.  Since they advertised the item that I came there for, these additional items will usually go unadvertised for at least 5 min, giving me an almost exclusive chance to purchase them.  It's important to remember that rare items are selling almost instantly, but it takes time for players to put each item up for sale.  In other posts around here someplace, I've told newer players to list all of their items, then use the free advertisement on only the best one, thus ensuring that everyone who responds to the ad will see all of their stuff, and increase their chance at a quick sale on those items they don't advertise.

I do that a lot too, reloading the city's depot to see what they're still adding. But it's been unusual numbers of rather common things, like 7 glass, not 10 common items or a small few rare items.

I also wait until I've listed all my items before advertising any, but usually advertise the least desirable items first, since the popular items will get picked up more easily by the opportunistic buyers, and that usually works well. If I list multiple sets of similar items, I usually don't advertise the first one, but the second or last one, hoping people will buy the similar but unadvertised items first. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

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@UncleSim69 wrote:

Why does the city I'm visiting, with nothing left in its Trade Depot, still have its ad for the stuff I just bought show up in the GTHQ?

Why does the market not allow us to set prices more freely, or search for what we need, so that the well-established laws of supply and demand can do their work, and ensure more consistent supplies for our demands, while we waste less time looking at stuff we don't want/need? Who could possibly profit from such a result?

Where are all the classic Sim City puns and clever remarks that characterized the great PC versions?

Why do I continue to waste my time? Why do I complain instead of just quitting? (Obviously I have a lot of time available) 😉

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@UncleSim69 -- I cannot answer all of your questions, but here's my take on these....

1)  When you visit the Global HQ and see an ad for an item, it was still available at the instant your Global HQ populated the trades you saw.  In another post, an EA rep states that there are over 8 million trades each day.  That's over 5,500 completed trades per minute.  As you can imagine, a lot of people see those same ads and click those same items, hoping to get lucky, but only the first one gets to purchase the item.  Meanwhile, that ad will stay in your Global HQ for 30 seconds before it clears.  This benefits those players with the fastest internet connections, since each player has to wait for the seller's entire city to load before having a chance at the item that is for sale.

2)  I don't know why EA refuses to see the benefit of a free market with true supply and demand curves.  I've suggested it over and over ad nauseam, as have many other players, but so far the only theory that anyone can come up with is either the unethical idea that frustration will lead to more SimCash purchases, or a bad case of not-invented-here syndrome.  I have an e-mail from EA that suggests that a commodities marketplace (like some other games use) would somehow place more burden on EA's servers than the current system does.  Given the amount of data that I am using, just to see mostly empty trade depots, I respectfully disagree with their assessment of this.  My data use with another game I used to play, that had a commodities market for P2P trades, was a quarter what it is now, and I was simultaneously playing multiple accounts spread across multiple servers on that PC game.

3)  Sim City just hasn't been the same since Maxis was fully integrated into EA and the original founder left the company.

4) Regarding your last question, I ask myself the same thing every time this game frustrates me. 😕mileyfrustrated: