FAQ about the Global Trade HQ [ Edited ]

[AmelieEA]

Greetings Mayors, 

Global Trade HQ has been a very popular feature in SimCity BuildIt. Every day over 8 million transactions take place, meaning that it is busier than the New York Stock Exchange! The game team wanted to answer some of the most frequently asked questions we see from Mayors in regards to the Global Trade HQ.

Why is there no search filter in the Global Trade HQ?
Global Trade HQ works in a way that every item sold is created by another player. Certain items have a higher demand than others, and generally the high demand items will sell a lot quicker than the low demand ones.
If we added a feature that would enable players to search for a specific item type, it would make the high demand items sell incredibly fast. This would then result in the high demanding items completely disappearing from the market, and almost no one would find the type of items that they need.
We strive to make the Global Trade HQ a balanced and fair place, regardless of your connection, device, or location. Adding a search of filter functionality would make it highly unfair for those who are not able to quickly grab each new item that is put up for sale.
Any kind of feature that favors the few at the expense of the majority will lead to an unequal experience, considering that over 8 million transactions are made on the Global Trade HQ every day!

Why is there no variety in the Global Trade HQ?
It all works based on the laws of Supply and Demand. Each item placed in the Global Market is created by another player. Certain items sell more than others, causing the overall share of particular items to be higher for items that have a high supply.
Due to his, slower selling items placed in the market will make it look like it is more difficult to find the higher selling ones, while the higher selling items will sell faster.  
The Global Trade HQ randomly picks a selection of items from the total available pool of items, and sometimes the system will pick a selection of items that have been on sale for a longer time.
We strive to improve the overall experience of the Global Trade HQ step by step with great care, as small tweaks can have considerable impact on millions of Mayors every day.

Why can’t we buy things from the Global Trade HQ directly instead of having to travel to the seller’s city?

The Global Trade HQ works like an advertisement catalogue for each player. Mayors can choose to either advertise particular items or sell them without advertising it. If the Mayor decides to advertise an item, it will be displayed in the Global Trade HQ in order to attract buyers to browse through the seller’s catalogue, and it is also a way for Mayors to showcase their cities.

In addition to enabling players to buy and sell items to other players around the world, we wanted the experience in itself to be fun and highly visual so that players could visit, admire, and learn from looking at the layout of other Mayor’s cities!

Are you taking player feedback into account when developing new content and updates for the game? 

Yes, we do. Each and every member of the team cares greatly about making SimCity BuildIt the best possible experience for all of our players. Having spent years working hard to make it the best city builder game for mobile devices, we constantly read the feedback coming in on Facebook, Twitter, the forums, reddit, and elsewhere on the internet. We believe in putting players first, and we also actively play the game every day in the office and during our free time, and encounter the same experiences as other Mayors out there. SimCity BuildIt was made by a passionate team of people who not only have a common goal, but also share a passion for great games.

The team at EA tracktwenty work continuously to tweak the market in order to make it a more enjoyable experience, and we thank you for your support!

[Shadowd3mon69]

One big question.

Why does the game crash all the time in the global trade market?

I can handle not finding items or the items being missing, but crashing every 4th or 5th place we visit is driving me crazy and I'm sure many others too. We know this isn't device specific as it's a global problem. Is there anyone working on this issue?

[czeuch]

I also have a question: the market was pretty much useless and infuriating back when the game was launched.

Then people complained and you heard us, changing it to a way where no other player would see what you saw.

However this brought a side effect (donuts, Vu and watches). Then you made a change and now we see other stuff, however the privacy feature (only you see what is being offered for you at the moment) was rolled back.

Why??

[sundevil1992]

From a Functional point of view, I am fine with this.  Unfortunately, the technical implementation has been a disaster on the enjoyability of the game.  The contention of trying to purchase items is way beyond the absurd level.  

I have 2 ideas for consideration:

Idea 1:

I believe you should look at how many instances a certain item that is for sale is displayed.  It  seems that if Item X is for sale, the entire community that is accessing the global market has the ability to purchase Item X.  I suggest that each item be limited to the number of mayors the ability to see an item for purchase for a brief period of time.  So, Item X  is put on the market.  After it has been displayed to Y number of mayors, do not display to other mayors until Z period of time has passed.  By limiting the contention, mayors will have a higher success rate of purchase.  And you can still keep your algorithms on what to display.

Idea 2:

You know what materials, we mayors, need when searching (I am not including dozers or storage items here).  If I am working on a cargo ship, a Vu challenge, or a building upgrade, I suggest you tweak your selling algorithms to weight items that I need higher than others.  It doesn't even have to be for entire panel - just a few.  

If you combine these two ideas, I think you will achieve a better marketplace experience while still abiding by your fundamental marketplace tenants.

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@AmelieEA wrote:

Why is there no search filter in the Global Trade HQ?
Global Trade HQ works in a way that every item sold is created by another player. Certain items have a higher demand than others, and generally the high demand items will sell a lot quicker than the low demand ones.
If we added a feature that would enable players to search for a specific item type, it would make the high demand items sell incredibly fast. This would then result in the high demanding items completely disappearing from the market, and almost no one would find the type of items that they need.
We strive to make the Global Trade HQ a balanced and fair place, regardless of your connection, device, or location. Adding a search of filter functionality would make it highly unfair for those who are not able to quickly grab each new item that is put up for sale.
Any kind of feature that favors the few at the expense of the majority will lead to an unequal experience, considering that over 8 million transactions are made on the Global Trade HQ every day!

[UncleSim69]

You say that availability is the reason you disallow filtering, but then why do you fix the range of prices? Everyone knows that price controls cause shortages. I wonder how much player time is wasted loading empty trade depots, thanks to our inability to price an item according to our estimation of its actual demand.

BTW, how many 'years' have you been working to make this the best city builder game for mobile devices, and why did I just learn of it in December?

[ncfroc]

Could you imagine if eBay or any other online market was implemented this way?  You can only view a randomly selected set of items and when you find an item you want, it's already sold.  That's not laws of supply and demand, that's just a poor implementation of a market place.

Instead of a item-specific search, consider a compromise that allows a filter based on product type (Vu items, Land Expansion, Storage Expansion, Hardware items, Building Supply items, etc...)?  For instance once you max out storage (if you were lucky enough to do this early), then you no longer care to search for them.

At one time the GTHQ was much better at mutual exclusive access of items that are displayed to a given user.  This seems to have regressed significantly.

It would be nice if you could refresh from within the GTHQ or show more products at one time.  The small windows of items you get to see at a time is very limiting since it is missing filtering capabilities.

I was hoping that there would be improvements to the GTHQ that we have all been asking for but I'm not holding my breath after seeing this post.  In fact this post was the complete opposite I wanted to see; justifying the current implementation as by design.

[Maximus1979mtl]

The trade hq is full of bull...

Fix it or remove it from the game completely.... pathetic. EA, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

[AmelieEA]

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@Shadowd3mon69 wrote:
One big question.

Why does the game crash all the time in the global trade market?

I can handle not finding items or the items being missing, but crashing every 4th or 5th place we visit is driving me crazy and I'm sure many others too. We know this isn't device specific as it's a global problem. Is there anyone working on this issue?

---

Hi, 

This is a known issue that we're currently working on fixing. We understand the frustrations and apologize for the inconvenience caused. 

[Persipan]

Oh, come on, let's at least be honest. 

First off, Global Trade HQ has not been' a very popular feature'.  Basically every other post on here is people complaining about it, and for good reason; it's incredibly frustrating. 

I do agree that a search feature would probably be less helpful than we might all like to think, given that it would do nothing to prevent items from selling before you could click through to them.  However, you're cheerfully ignoring the massive frustration involved in repeatedly opening, scrolling through, closing and re-opening the Trade HQ just for the possibility of getting to the point of clicking on an item.  Which will be gone before you get to it, because the high-demand items already 'sell incredibly fast'.  It is, literally, possible to spend hours attempting to buy an item and still not be successful.  This is not a functional system, and none of the tweaking you've done so far has made it so.

I find the mention of 'supply and demand' entirely disingenuous.  In a genuine marketplace, supply and demand is key; in the Global Trade HQ it's of very limited practical relevance because we have no way of knowing a) how much supply there is of any given item or b) how much demand there is.  At best, individual players can observe something along the lines of "look, lots of doughnuts; perhaps that means fewer people want doughnuts than are selling them"; but it's terribly hit and miss.  Without access to something along the lines of a search function it's not possible to get any real sense of the relative availability of items and make decisions about what to sell/buy.  It's all just guesswork and luck. 

Equally, regarding travel to other cities - I actually do enjoy looking at other cities, but it's generally the last thing I want to do when I'm actively trying to buy something, because I know that process will take foooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeevvvvvvveeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr and don't want to interrupt it by sightseeing.  The option to visit and view cities is great (and I'd actually like to be able to go one further, and be able to 'friend' cities I've visited and found interesting) but there is absolutely no logical reason why this function needs to be combined with the Trade HQ; and, in fact, doing so creates a delay in purchasing items that must surely disadvantage anyone playing on a slower device or with a slower connection.  That unequal, unfair experience you're so concerned about?  You've created it yourselves, apparently on purpose, and persist in defending it rather than addressing the issue. 

Personally, I'd be in favour of a genuinely supply-and-demand based system, where players can place an order and sellers can fill it, and a genuine sense of supply and demand can enter into transactions; coupled with a sightseeing option allowing you to visit other cities just to take a look. 

[Shadowd3mon69]

Thank you for the response Amelia, I truly hope your team finds a solution for the crashing. In my opinion it's the only thing wrong with the current system, everything else works great for me.