Quick, quick, quick! Roll up, roll up, roll up! Monopoly city streets has restarted and the world is ready for the taking, except not quite so much now.
First the good news: Monopoly City Streets has restarted and we can all play again (yay!)
Now the bad news: many new rules have been introduced that many feel has a detrimental effect on the game.
The biggest bombshell is the new tax system that has been introduced. Now although I felt some kind of tax system should be integrated within the game, the way they have gone about it is overkill to say the least.
From now on, you are allowed to have 5 streets completely tax free. When you buy your 6th street you will be taxed 3% on your rental income (so if you are earning $10m per day from your 6 streets, you will be taxed $300k).
But it gets worse, for each additional street you get an additional 3% tax on total rental income. So if you have 15 streets, the total tax is 30%! Once you get to 38 streets, you will start paying money each turn instead of earning it. Naturally this has caused quite a big backlash amongst the users. If the point of the game is to dominate the world and build your monopoly, how on Earth are you expected to do that with just 38 streets (which will earn you $0 per day)!
Other notable changes include recalculating the costs of the streets, so now their doesn’t seem to be an upper limit on the cost of the roads like before. This has the added advantage of providing even more rent from your buildings than before. So a road that costs around $2.3m Monopoly dollars can earn you $180k per day from a single $75k city centre cottage. Wow! So the amount you can earn from a single street has been increased greatly.
This means that there doesn’t seem to be much change in the way of tactics, it’s still all about finding the longest most expensive streets, I just don’t get why people are wasting their ‘tax free’ allowance on the small tiny streets that can only earn a fraction of a single long road. Anyway, their loss is our gain, right?
Unfortunately the developers still haven’t introduced any account verification (they claim it’s due to the youngsters that use the system). The fallout from this is that people are already cheating the system, with one guy amassing a $2bn monopoly dollar fortune in less than 48 hours! Did they do this legitimately? I think not:
That just about covers the major changes to the game, some are good, like the no upper price limit for the streets, others are not so good like the tax and lack of user validation.
So Mr. Monopoly has spoken and the game will be reset on Thursday (which is today, depending on which part of the world you are living in) at 3pm GMT. They have then been very deliberately vague in when the game will restart, it could be anywhere from 12 to 24 hours. I think this deliberate vagueness is to try and avoid the land rush that we saw this time last week (can you believe the game is only a week old?!) and to not have people hit the servers all at once, however there are going to be tens of thousands of people waiting by after 12 hours hitting refresh every few minutes.
Everyone will be starting on the same footing, $3m monopoly dollars and the world at your feet. They also claim that they have improved the registration system (says a small prayer that there is at least some verification now) as well as numerous tweaks throughout the entire game.
Bring on the restart, newbies beware 
There has been a lot of talk in the last week on the best strategy for Monopoly City Streets, so let me begin by throwing in my 2 cents worth of Monopoly dollars.
I personally feel that there is very little strategy to this game, the turn based process eliminates a lot of strategy and restricts what is possible within the game. So you get your money once every 24 hours and within an hour it’s all gone and you’re waiting for another 24 hours, while in the mean time your competitors are sabotaging your streets and demolishing your building and you are pretty much helpless other than to look on.
So, ending my rant and back to City Centre Cottages, here are four reasons why I think you should be using them in the game.
To sum up, let the kids and wannabes buy their famous roads and build big white elephant buildings. If you really want to excel at this game, do the wise thing, buy those $1m dollar roads and fill ‘em up with city centre cottages!
As the game progresses, tens of thousands of players from around the world are banging on the doors of the developers demanding to know the answers to their questions – surprising when there is already quite a comprehensive Monopoly City Streets FAQ page here.
We’ve been reading the forums and blogs to try and find out what the most popular questions are that are not already addressed in the FAQ page above. So here goes…
Q. Can a bonus building be destroyed?
A. Yes, a bonus building can be destroyed and then a hazard can be placed on your street. It kinda sucks, but all a bonus building can do is prevent a hazard being placed, once it’s destroyed your competitors can place unlimited number of hazards on your road. We recommend keeping at least two bonus buildings on your most valuable streets and filling up the rest with buildings.
Q. Can I save my demolition chance cards to be used later?
A. No, you have to use your chance cards as soon as you get them otherwise they will be lost.
Q. If I forget to login one day, will my rent accrue for the next time I login?
A. No, you have to login every day to get your rent money. If you skip a day, you will lose all the rent you would have earned for that day – set a reminder to login to your account, even if you don’t have time to do anything, just don’t lose out on a days rent!
Q. Can I have more than one account?
A. We’re still waiting for official word from Mr. Monopoly, but in all likelyhood if you are using your additional accounts to try and cheat the system, you will probably be banned. If you have an account, your brother / sister has an account, then it probably won’t be an issue. We’d like to see the developers bring in an SMS verification system as this would be harder to cheat than just an email verification system.
Q. What’s the best strategy to use?
A. People are still trying to figure out and understand the game, but there is already some discussion on the best Monopoly City Streets strategy in our fourms.
Q. How much do I earn each day?
A. You earn a ’salary’ of $1m every day (which is rather nice! I wish I was a Monopoly tycoon!) plus rental income from your streets and buildings. You earn approximately 10% of the street value and the amount you earn from your buildings depends on the length of the road and building type.
Q. How are the value of the roads calculated? I see a street in New York costs the same as in my small town in Ohio…how??
A. The game values the road based on the length, not on the prestige or apparent value in real life. So that sleepy undeveloped stretch of road near your town is probably worth more than Wall Street and Rodeo Drive in Monopoly City Streets!
If you have any more questions about Monopoly City Streets, then post a reply here or ask a question in our Monopoly City Streets Help forum.
Well after all that Who-hah and a dogs breakfast of a site launch, it’s hardly surprising that the developers and Hasbro have decided to reset the game. They haven’t given an exact date yet, but they say it will be some time next week and we’ll have 24 hours notice of the reset.
So is this a good thing?
Although people will be complaining, come on, it’s been 3 days since it started, maybe less if you couldn’t access the site when it first launched. Even though we now know that it’s not the prestige of the street that will make you money, I know there will be some that are disappointed – especially those with streets in the 90210 area and central New York! But look at how many people are blatantly cheating the system…
This screenshot shows how some players have managed to amass a staggering M3.2 billion in just 3 days! If that’s not a clear case of cheating using the Monopoly City Streets cheat that we talked about in a previous post, I don’t know what is!
Anyway, for those of us who are playing the game at the moment and know the correct strategy (which I might write about in a future post), I think we will welcome the reset and are eager to get cracking and prove that we are the Monopoly kings! Keep your Wall Street and Pall Mall, I’m quite happy with my 10 mile country roads that you don’t know about
Bring on the reset next week!
If there is a way to cheat in a game, people will generally try to do it. There has been cases of cheating in most of the most popular MMO’s and Monopoly City Streets is no different. However, since MCS is currently free, I guess it makes it so much easier and rampant.
In a very bizarre oversight, it seems as though the developers decided not to verify peoples accounts (you don’t even need an email address to sign up).
This has led to thousands of people signing up for multiple accounts – each one loaded with M3,000,000. The process of cheating in Monopoly City Streets is relatively simple.
Pretty soon you can rack up millions in your master account and world domination is suddenly a whole lot easier.
I seriously hope that Hasbro and the developers get this fixed soon – and I’m utterly amazed that they let such a glaring hole in the game which is so obviously open to exploitation. I assume at some point they’ll be looking to clear up the cheaters – it’s not too hard when you start tracking IP addresses of people and looking at the transactions between them.
It seems that at the very least there should be some email verification, but even better would be to send an SMS with a code to your mobile.
So here we are in to the second day of Monopoly City Streets and although server access is still icky and sucky, it’s definitely more playable than it was yesterday, still, thousands of people are complaining that they still can’t access the server and there is a general feeling of unhappiness all around.
In the first screenshot below, you can see how streets are bought and marked out. The red highlighted streets show the roads that are owned by you and the blue highlighted roads are streets owned by other people.
Clicking on the roads brings up a card that tells you who owns the street, you can also go ahead and make an offer for the street.
You can even place houses and other buildings on your road. For every building that you place, you earn a small amount of rent from it, which can help you build more roads and more houses and generally helping you to complete the aim of the game, which is to become a Monopoly!
When you click on a road that you own, you will get a property card like the one below which lets you sell the property or build houses and other buildings.
There is a huge range of buildings to choose from, here is a selection from the bottom and top end. The buildings are grayed out if you can’t afford them, so I’ll try and post some colour copies soon!
Finally, in the screenshot below, you can see how the buildings look when they are actually placed on the map…
Watch out for more screenshots coming soon, if you haven’t already, go and signup to our Monopoly City Streets Forum and ask any questions that you might have – especially if you are still waiting to get in on the game!
So here we are, 6 hours after the launch and the Monopoly City Streets servers still can’t cope with the incredible load. What I find even more surprising is how much interest there has been in this game and I only read about it today! But come on EA / Hasbro. This is 2009, not 2000. You’re running a process heavy flash game, what did you expect?! Get with the programme and deal with the IT guy who said that a couple of servers would be enough to run this shindig.
As someone already commented, did you enlist professional help when you launched this or did you get the office intern to buy a couple of servers from The Planet and think that it would be ok.
After constant loading, refreshing and clicking, I finally seem to have created an account, however, all my street purchases didn’t go through. Anyway, I thought I’d post a screenshot of the members area to show you what controls you had.
I’m still getting messages saying that there are no available streets, which can’t be right when I’m looking at the roads in my tiny little town.
If you still haven’t registered or been able to purchase a street, be warned, virtually all the ‘good’ streets have already gone. However, don’t fret, I have a theory that the street value in Monopoly City Streets is actually based on the length of the road rather than the prestige that it carries in the real world. Having said that, the ‘good’ streets will probably become more valuable more quickly.
With the eagerly anticipated release of Hasbro’s Monopoly City Streets, 10’s of thousands of gamers attempted to access the site when it went live just after 12:15 GMT today. The surge in visitors virtually knocked the site offline and people around the world reported slow or sluggish response times – not to mention tempers flaring when they realized they couldn’t get the streets they wanted.
After many page refreshes we finally got to the Flash animation and in to the site and started searching around – check out the screenshot below! Naturally, by the time you access this site, all the major roads will have gone, so you’ll be left fighting for the scraps, like the street you live on (which we’re sure is a lovely street, but it’s not Wall Street now, is it?).
In the meantime, if you still can’t access the site, the only option is to keep trying to refresh. I still don’t understand why companies do this. They build themselves up for a big launch and completely fail to take in to account the server requirements. The result? Stressed and pissed off users.