trade depot OVERWHELMED with Vu Tower items!?
Title says it all! Why?! 8-15 slots always taken up with disaster items for the tower! ? I don't even have the tower built! why are 30-50% of the spots wasted? Should be an easy fix to not offer items...
Forum Discussion
EA's explanation of why so many Vu items are for sale is actually scary. They are claiming it is because the Vu disasters now take fewer items to initiate. In other words, the Vu Tower is much better now and people don't need so many Vu items.
Wrong.
People are dumping their Vu items because the Tower now feels like a waste of time and resources. There are many things wrong with the Vu Tower but the worst is that you now have to repair many more buildings for the same amount of keys as previously. This does not seem to be fun for anyone and many have just stopped using Vu.
Vu items are being sold because the new design is very, very bad and not appealing to the players. I hope that the developers actually realize this and are just putting a positive spin on things while they fix the real root of the problem.
Edit: Writing the above few paragraphs made me think that I should try the Vu Tower one more time to see if I was off-base. Here is what I found:
I tried Meteor Strike I because I would only have to repair 1 property and there was a 50% chance I'd get a key. The cost to start the disaster was 2 Vu Gloves. (This doesn't seem to be significantly fewer than for the previous version but whatever.) The result is the nice new animations, a single RZ being destroyed (as promised), and a reward of 500 simoleans for repairing the building. Repairing the building will cost at least 4 hours of item fabrication time plus many thousands of simoleans. So, every 4 hours I can spend thousands of simoleans and tie up my production lines to earn 500 bucks.
I feel like I am being punished, not rewarded for using Vu. And that, of course, is not fun. And that is why people are dumping their Vu items.
A possible fix would be to increase the simolean reward to a minimum of 5000 but with the possibility of earning much more. Even as much as 50,000 or more. Make it rare enough that it doesn't upset the economy but common enough to get people interested in taking the chance. So you either get a key or you get a monetary reward that you are reasonably happy to get. This just seems like Game Design 100. Reward your players for properly using your game features. Don't punish them. So obvious.
Trust me this isn't the first time I've encountered such stupidity with their team. After the update that forced a 30second refresh I let them know how bad this was.. here was my note:
"Congratulations… I was very excited when I saw there was a new global HQ in this most recent update. After dealing with the horrible interface and experience of trying to use it, I never imagined you could actually make it any worse. It must have come at a tremendous and painstaking effort to take something, and muck it up so bad that it is now utterly useless. Good job. Please pass these recommendations/UX's to the dev-team:
1) Remove the 30 sec refresh or give player ability to search. Ugh so ANNOYING, do you guys not actually PLAY this game or even TALK to a player before rolling these updates out?!?!?!? I use to be able to close then reopen to refresh now, I get to guess at what has already been purchased, then stare at it for 30 sec...brilliant!
2) WHY DO I HAVE TO CLOSE THEN REOPEN TO REFRESH?!?!?! It should automatically refresh… Or at the very minimum after the time expires show a refresh button.
3) Why do I need to travel to their city when trying to buy something? Nobody cares to see the other city!!!! Seriously… Why don't you sit down and watch how a power-user plays this game, you'll see that they click on the Global HQ, click on the product to buy, see that it's gone then IMMEDIATELY go back to the Global HQ. This is a stupid, unneeded and completely useless feature. (Not to mention that trying to load cities that are in a different language take far longer to load, and by the time it loads everything is been purchased....effing brilliant!!!) If you want to give the ability to "travel" to the "neighboring" city to see what other cities look like...then put in a map that shows by geo-location other local player's cities."
They were so kind to reply that was at length but this was what REALLY got me: "The timer cool down period has been introduced to reduce the frenzy, reduce the purchase failure rate (which we have already seen drop by over 60%) and to give those players with less powerful devices and slower internet connections a chance of buying items too."
Soooo by instituting a 30-sec "cool down" they've see a drop by over 60%....this is kinda like them saying HEY GREAT NEWS!!! We have reduced your need to go to the gas station to buy gas by 100% by taking your car away...Isn't that GREAT?!?!?! F* ING GENIUS!!!!!!!
