Trade center rarely get buy items that are for sale?

[CJDoom_81]

Ok just for some perverted fun Ive been surfing the Global Trade HQ for the past hour steadily. When I say steady I mean I've been tapping on it once per second for the last hour in search of two storage bars for a total of roughly 3600 hits and here's what i found:

-Not once out of 3600 hundred hits did I find the same list of sellers or items during consecutive search. This means at least for me that the global trade center is being updated every few milliseconds.

-I have come across about five hundred storage bars in the past hour but everytime I click on one and go to the city to purchase it the trade depot is empty. (Again I perform this action about once per second).

-On very rare occasions I made it to the sellers depot and the bars were there but by the time I actually tap on the item it says "item is longer available for sale".

This tells me that all these transactions are occurring within fractions of seconds in the global market and the only way to actually buy anything on the market is to be a bot or something...PLEASE FIX!

[CJDoom_81]

Either trading has improved or I have found a way to find and buy items before they get scooped up. In the past hour or so I have succesfully located and purchased dozens of much needed items without much effort. Including an entire set of 14 expansion items very cheaply.

Up until now when I surfed the Global Trade HQ I would visit the players city, find out they had nothing in their markets, then returned to my city and started the whole process again.

But now I've found that if I visit their city and find nothing...rather than return to my city to resume search, I tap on THEIR Global Trade HQ instead..the list of available items comes up and 9 times out of 10 the first city I tap on still has the item available.

Not sure if its just my imagination but the difference is night and day since I started searching via others trade HQs..I can find virtually everything I need almost immediately and many times at a premium price

Hope this helps

CJ

[Ifni15]

Is it possible that the game is just unbalanced? Acquisition of one or two items that rare shouldn't be dependent on an inadequate trading system. If they can't afford to refresh the server often enough there should be another answer. Increasing the spawn frequency of certain items should do the trick.

[mouse970]

I have had the same issue. Where do the items go after you buy them. Should go to inventory, but they never did.

[aruspice]

I receive the same answer from support:

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Yatin Balwani (SimCity BuildIt)

Jan 03 01:38

Hello Mayor, thanks for contacting us.

I'm sorry you've been having a frustrating time trading and purchasing. The Global Market moves extremely fast and the most desirable items go very quickly, so it's important to grab an item as soon as you see it!

If our servers refreshed your Market every couple of seconds it would cause a huge strain on the game, your device, your data and your battery - so to show the Market in real time would not be a great playing experience either. It's not all bad news though - as more and more players join the game there will be more and more items available for sale in the Global Market, so supply and demand will get better every day.

If you're worried that the Simoleons were taken from your account when the sale failed, don't worry - the Simoleons are refunded back to your currency totals afterwards, the next time you visit your Trade Depot. We know this isn't very clear at the moment so are working hard on improving this messaging for the future!

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[9ddabdde32d9d970]

The corollary that as more people join the game will mean that it will be easier to gain access to items on the Global Market, is, in my opinion an incorrect statement.

Yes there WILL be more items for sale, but there will also be more people vying for those items. This will mean nothing will change. Those people with a faster end to end system (not just local Internet speeds) will STILL get to the items .

So unless the proportions of buyers and sellers (supply and demand) change, the larger game player base will not affect the success of purchase.