AmelieEA wrote (in part):
(My responses are green and bold, like this sentence, or sometimes red, for emphasis.)
Every day over 8 million transactions take place....
With this many transactions, I have no doubt that somebody, somewhere is selling the items I want. So why can't I get them when I want them? Let's discuss that.
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.
So far, that is absolutely true and is not being disputed.
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.
They already sell incredibly fast. If you are talking about a difference measured in milliseconds, I don't really care. What I do care about is the fact that most items are gone when the seller's city finally loads. In fact, most of my purchases of rare items have occurred when I clicked someone's sale of some other item -- often a common item -- and found they were selling a rare item or two as well.
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.
This is already the case.
We strive to make the Global Trade HQ a balanced and fair place, regardless of your connection, device, or location.
Not true. The current system favors those with high speed data connections, since players must wait for entire cities to download, and this takes longer on slow connections. Official corporate positioning does not change fact.
Adding a search [or] 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.
Not true. As I will discuss below, and have mentioned on other threads, and as others have already pointed out previously, a filter combined with the removal of artificial price caps, will allow a true supply and demand economy to develop. People have written doctoral dissertations about supply and demand economies within virtual worlds -- perhaps EA should hire some of them.
Any kind of feature that favors the few at the expense of the majority will lead to an unequal experience.
Yep! That's what we have now.
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.
Only partly true. The price caps in place in this game seriously distort normal supply and demand curves. Because of the price caps, nearly everything is listed at maximum price, even if the demand is low. Exceptions are those players who want to dump something quickly and those who accept default pricing without changing the asking price, or in some cases, those who want to draw attention to their unsold items.
Due to [t]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.
This would be fixed with a filter.
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.
How random can it be? It only shows items a player can make (i.e. it doesn't show items that are still locked) and tends to show items the player doesn't need yet. This is one of the reasons players don't trust it and assume that it is designed to get players to spend SimCash. I will discuss the ethics of this below.
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.
Yes, but not making the major tweaks that are needed is also affecting 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.
The idea of showcasing cities is a good one, but it has no business being tied to global trade. In reality, I feel that this is EA's way of justifying a system where players are asked to spend SimCash to advertise extra items. Again, corporate positioning does not make it true.
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!
The experience is not fun, as it is implemented currently.
The deeper question is why do I need to use my data to constantly download other player's cities? Visiting those cities could be fun, but not when I am grinding to buy just one item that I need.
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.
But it's not the "best possible experience" -- many other games implement trading systems that work much smoother than the Global HQ does, and they have been doing so since before development started on this game. I will say that the time spent developing the rendering engine, providing a fully 3D environment on a small mobile device, constant time of day changes, etc. all work beautifully! We don't see anybody complaining that the visuals aren't stunning or that there should be a simple way to rotate the screen -- all of this stuff gets a solid A grade in my book.
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.
Really? Are you the ones buying all the expansion items then? Just kidding, of course, but it would be easy to imagine that you have a more direct connection to the servers than we do, and may have an upper hand in getting these rare items, or may not fully appreciate how difficult it is for anyone without that direct connection to actually play the game.
OK, that's enough quoting. Now, let's talk about how this thing should work.
Ethics: First, it is not ethical to use broken game mechanics to force players to choose to spend premium currency in order to play the game. It is not clear if EA is doing this intentionally, or not, but that's the impression many players have (as evidenced by many comments throughout answers.ea.com, including many of those above). In order to get players to spend SimCash, EA should be striving to create compelling gameplay along with a steady supply of unique premium items that players will desire to have in their cities. There will always be players who will never spend any real money to purchase premium currency -- that's the nature of "free to play" games -- but if the game is compelling, there will be enough who do spend real money to pay the cost of developing and running the game for a long time to come. Just look at The Simpsons Tapped Out -- another EA title -- if you need a better example of how this can work. That game has made a ton of money for EA, without using broken game mechanics to force players to spend money just to bypass those frustrations. (There has recently been one exception to this, but it is an ongoing issue that will hopefully be fixed soon.) [edit: Indeed, the exception mentioned here has been fixed now!]
Global HQ: After much consideration, I feel that the best way to fix the Global HQ would be to create a commodities market for each of the items that can be bought and sold. This would be expandable if EA adds more items in the future. Player would click Global HQ and then select the item he/she wants to buy or sell, instead of having to find a player who is selling and advertising a particular item. Any item could be selected, but it would filter out items the player could not create or use yet. Players could place "buy" or "sell" orders and set the price they were looking for. There would be no need to load other players' cities into their devices (this would significantly reduce the load on EA's servers, and on our own data plans, if we have those). To work correctly, there would be no caps or minimums on prices (and Daniel would not purchase unsold items). Laws of supply and demand would kick in, and each item would eventually stabilize at a price that reflects the community's desire to purchase it, balanced against the supply. To be efficient, prices would update about 10 times per minutes (every 6 sec) and would only be updated for the item we are interested in, while we are in the Global HQ.
Realizing that this is not perfectly clear to those who have not seen this done before, here are the steps I would go through to sell an item, and then I will follow with the steps to buy an item.
Click Global HQ
Click "metal" (probably an icon)
Click "sell" (any quantity up to ten, as long as I have that many in inventory)
Select a quantity (probably a plus and minus sign, as used elsewhere)
Select a price per unit (any price I want, whole units only, probably capped at 999,999). The default will be the current best offer price being offered by buyers.
At this point, options will be to confirm, or cancel the transaction. When confirmed, the system will add my sale to to the list, and buyers will see it, if I am offering the best price. They won't see my name or my city -- they'll just see that I've listed metal at a price of 8 or 5 or whatever the price is that I pick.
For me as a buyer, the steps would be similar.
Click Global HQ
Click "nails"
Click "buy"
Select a quantity (any number up to ten)
Select a price per unit (whatever I'm willing to pay, capped at 999,999, default will be current best selling price offered by sellers.
Same options to confirm or cancel. When confirmed, transaction will be placed on the list and sellers would see it, again without my name or city name.
For both types of transactions, when the server received a request, it would try to match up one person's sale with another person's purchase, and would transfer the goods accordingly. When this happens, the completed transaction would take a "slot" in the Global HQ and wait to be claimed until I click it (similar to claiming my Simoleons in the current Trade Depot). I could only claim purchased items if I have enough slots open in my storage -- similar to the way manufactured items need to be claimed before more can be made.
So let's say I try to sell five hammers, for 15 each, but others are selling them cheaper right now. My transaction will list at 15, the hammers would be removed from my city inventory and placed in a "slot" and simply wait until the price goes up to 15, which it might or might not do. If I got tired of waiting for them to sell, or decided they would never sell at the price I listed them at, I could cancel the sale and the hammers would be returned to me (via the same slot -- I'd still need space in my City Storage in order to get them back into inventory).
So how much data would all this take? A lot less than grinding through city after city looking for one item. The Global HQ would only update while I was in it (other than for notifications that something had sold), and would only update the commodity that I am looking at during any particular time frame.
I've based this on a simplified version of how real-world online commodities trading systems work, a concept that was already incorporated into other games I was playing years and years ago. (I won't name any of them since I don't believe they were EA properties.)
[edit: this section added] Trade Depot: The original trade depot would remain intact, including trades with Daniel, as a way to encourage players to add neighbors to their cities and visit and trade with same. Players wishing to utilize it would place sell orders in their trade depot as they do now (but without the need to advertise them) and they would tap the trade depot in a neighbor's city to see what might be available for purchase from their friends.
