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.
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.