So I think the My Town 2 community needs a separate thread to honestly discuss the many problems inherent in this fine game which we all obviously love. The problem with trying to do so in the "Anybody Playing My Town 2?" thread is that the purpose of that thread is about communal bonding and meeting one another and discussing the game generally, along with strategies. This thread has a much more narrow focus. I want to explore the problems. I'll list my five top issues and please feel free to comment and add to this. Some of these issues Booyah will hopefully address, and some we may as customers have to bring to their attention directly.
(1) It's way too hard to earn bucks.
This is probably the #1 complaint of the playerbase. At this time, there are 8 different ways to earn game bucks. To an outsider that may sound great, but the reality is, it's still a constantly struggle.
(a) Booyah "Share" - You earn bucks by telling people about the game through Twitter, text, E-mail & Facebook. Easy way to earn 3 bucks a share, but you can only do each one once. So you get a maximum of $12 in game bucks, and that's all you are ever gonna get.
(b) Gifting Bucks - This requires you reach Level 10 on at least one business. Not too terrible, every person who gifts you can give you $3 a day. The problem is, it requires you to do nearly 2,000 jobs on a building or shell out a lot of game bucks on automatic upgrades. Great when you get there, but very time-consuming unless you already have bucks to spare.
(c) Franchising - Unlike coins, in which you get 25% of the purchase price when someone franchises one of your buildings, with bucks you only get 10% back. This could still be a windfall, as someone with tons of bucks who buys your business for 18,000 game bucks will pass along 1,800 of those bucks to you. However, recently a change was made by Booyah setting a cap on bucks earned to a measly 50 bucks maximum. So someone spending a fortune in game bucks is barely gonna lift your buck count at all unless they franchise a lot of businesses from you.
(d) Daily Lottery - Despite Booyah's claim that each day will give you "better prizes," in reality you get 1 game buck a day for logging in IF you continue logging in every day. If you don't, you are back to getting coins each day. Big whoop.
(e) Random Town Errands - Sometimes for helping the townsfolk find their way, you get a free game buck along with the usual coins and experience. This is pretty rare though. By my count, you get like 1 game buck for every 30 errands. Since the errands come around like once every 5 minutes, you have to log some serious game time to make any real money this way.
(f) "Free Bucks" - You earn bucks for satisfying the terms and conditions of an offer by one of Booyah's sponsors, i.e. signing up for a credit card. I did this once, and was never credited any bucks. Waste of time and possibly money and way too much trouble to go through for any amount of bucks.
(g) Leveling Up - Every new level, you get a free buck. The problem is, the game is capped at 50 levels. Once you hit Level 50, no more bucks. Obviously Booyah will add levels at some point, but it's pretty bad when a consistent tried and true method of getting bucks is stripped away because the game designers got lazy and didn't bother to extend the game after 4 months of it being out.
(h) Buying Them With Real Money - The biggest joke of them all. It's way too expensive to do this. You would have to pay $10 in real money just to buy the Empire State Building, which gives a small 10% boost to your business incomes. For $100, you would get 1600 game bucks, and that's not even close to enough to buy a popular out-of-area business. For me, The Mixer Bar in Paris (currently the most popular business in the game) costs about 32,000 in game bucks to franchise. Get this: that's $2,000 in real money!!! ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?
(2) The My Town Stock Exchange is totally broken.
Many players have realized that you can earn nearly infinite coins by converting all your businesses to offices, then building a bunch of Stock Exchanges. The fact is, Booyah dropped the ball big time here and people are taking serious advantage. These are the problems with the Stock Exchange:
(a) It's way too small. Most wonders take up an entire land parcel. The Stock Exchange is so small that you can fit 4 of them on a single parcel. That allows you to be able to put down a ton of them without sacrificing too much space.
(b) Giving a 20% boost to all of one building type is too strong for a wonder that can be bought in coins. The Championship Stadium is technically better than the Stock Exchange, but it costs 65 game bucks, it's much larger, and it's a limited edition item.
(c) It's too cheap. 30,000 coins? Ridiculous considering the boost. With 75 Stock Exchanges out, I was earning about 130 million coins PER BUILDING EVERY THREE MINUTES. On a cycle of like 25 buildings, we are talking over 3billion in coins collectively every 3 minutes. Do the math. That's silly stupid for an investment of a little more than 2 million coins for the 75 wonders.
(d) This is possible because of problem #4: the stupid things actually stack, so they keep getting incrementally better in numbers.
The solution here is either make the Stock Exchange cost bucks, make it not stack, or limit it to only 1 per town.
(3) There are power issues involving many of the other wonders.
The main issues here are the Statue of Liberty, the Intergalactic Spaceport, and the Lucky Chance Casino.
(a) Statue of Liberty - The most expensive wonder by far at 420 game bucks, and a total ripoff. 50,000 population bonus sounds great, but the price is too high. You could get the same result buying 5 power plants, which cost only coins. But the real downside to it comes when you look at the spaceport...
(b) Intergalactic Spaceport - It's way too good and way too cheap at 80 game bucks. A 20% population boost may not immediately sound great. At low levels when you have like 40,000 people, you are only getting a boost of 8,000. But this wonder rewards the late game player. When you have 400,000 people, suddenly the same wonder is giving you 80,000 people. So let's do the math. If you buy 5 Intergalactic Spaceports for 400 game bucks, you get a population boost of 400,000. That's 8 TIMES AS MUCH AS THE STATUE OF LIBERTY FOR LESS GAME BUCKS!!!
(c) Lucky Chance Casino - This one I really, really hate. The first two are clearly unbalanced, but this one...just wow. It literally DOES NOT DO ANYTHING TO HELP YOU. Let's look at what it actually does. First off, let me start by saying you have to spend $4 in real money to acquire it. Not coins, not game bucks, actual out of pocket cash. For a digital item in a free app. I'll admit it looks amazing and I bought one because of the visual kick-assness. I mean, it has a roulette fountain in the front, come on. But what it does is, it gives you a 5% chance of getting double coins when clicking on one of your properties. Do the math and you'll see that means that 1 out of 20 buildings will give you double coin payout. WHAT? That's incredibly minimal and weak, and no other wonder does so, so little. If one of your buildings even produced enough coins to make this effect decent (for instance, you have a lot of Stock Exchanges), then you already are getting so many coins that this "bonus" is simply irrelevant. If your buildings are producing like 150 or 200 coins a pop (pretty typical), then an extra 150 or 200 coins ONE OUT OF EVERY 20 TIMES YOU CLICK is just plain pathetic.
(4) There's simply not enough land to expand adequately.
Booyah has and will continue to rectify this problem, but the main issue I have here is, look at the damn size of the map. Booyah could be making our towns like 10 times the size they are and still have more room to expand. Why are they limiting us and then imposing lengthy wait times until releasing more plots? The folly is, every holiday or big event, they are releasing special items, but not more land. Plenty of players don't even bother building roads. Why? Because they take up too much damn room on the map. So in a game where the object is to build a dream town, you can't even be building roads if you want to keep dropping businesses and homes / community buildings and decorations. That's utter insanity. Give us the tools we need to succeed instead of imposing artificial limitations and handicaps.
(5) There's not enough choices to make distinctively different towns from one another.
This is a minor gripe, but still worth addressing. Yes, there are a lot of choices to choose from when building, but it's not enough. Too many of these towns look the same, because so many cool items are bucks-only and therefore prohibitive. And some of them just plain suck so that nobody will waste space on them. People should not mainly be building condos and high-rise condos when placing housing, but they kind of have to because those homes give the best population / income boost for their price. Yes, townhouses and lofts may look better and give flavor, but they are subpar buildings so they will not be used as much.
I personally use a lot of the "crap" buildings like the apartments and the Victorians because they fit my themes, but for the competitive player, they make no sense. People should not have towns full of subways and military barracks but these are small and give big boosts, so most players ignore that they are sacrificing vision and creativity. They simply do what makes the most sense to raising population so they can maximize their businesses.
Also, we are missing major things to flesh out the towns. Here's a few:
- chain link fences
- beaches
- tractors
- water spaces
- natural objects such as hills, mountains, and lakes
- bridges
- two-lane roads
- more street signs such as yield and caution
If you like this analysis and agree with my thoughts, show some support and write to Booyah telling them what you think. Also, comments and additional thoughts are certainly welcome.
(1) It's way too hard to earn bucks.
This is probably the #1 complaint of the playerbase. At this time, there are 8 different ways to earn game bucks. To an outsider that may sound great, but the reality is, it's still a constantly struggle.
(a) Booyah "Share" - You earn bucks by telling people about the game through Twitter, text, E-mail & Facebook. Easy way to earn 3 bucks a share, but you can only do each one once. So you get a maximum of $12 in game bucks, and that's all you are ever gonna get.
(b) Gifting Bucks - This requires you reach Level 10 on at least one business. Not too terrible, every person who gifts you can give you $3 a day. The problem is, it requires you to do nearly 2,000 jobs on a building or shell out a lot of game bucks on automatic upgrades. Great when you get there, but very time-consuming unless you already have bucks to spare.
(c) Franchising - Unlike coins, in which you get 25% of the purchase price when someone franchises one of your buildings, with bucks you only get 10% back. This could still be a windfall, as someone with tons of bucks who buys your business for 18,000 game bucks will pass along 1,800 of those bucks to you. However, recently a change was made by Booyah setting a cap on bucks earned to a measly 50 bucks maximum. So someone spending a fortune in game bucks is barely gonna lift your buck count at all unless they franchise a lot of businesses from you.
(d) Daily Lottery - Despite Booyah's claim that each day will give you "better prizes," in reality you get 1 game buck a day for logging in IF you continue logging in every day. If you don't, you are back to getting coins each day. Big whoop.
(e) Random Town Errands - Sometimes for helping the townsfolk find their way, you get a free game buck along with the usual coins and experience. This is pretty rare though. By my count, you get like 1 game buck for every 30 errands. Since the errands come around like once every 5 minutes, you have to log some serious game time to make any real money this way.
(f) "Free Bucks" - You earn bucks for satisfying the terms and conditions of an offer by one of Booyah's sponsors, i.e. signing up for a credit card. I did this once, and was never credited any bucks. Waste of time and possibly money and way too much trouble to go through for any amount of bucks.
(g) Leveling Up - Every new level, you get a free buck. The problem is, the game is capped at 50 levels. Once you hit Level 50, no more bucks. Obviously Booyah will add levels at some point, but it's pretty bad when a consistent tried and true method of getting bucks is stripped away because the game designers got lazy and didn't bother to extend the game after 4 months of it being out.
(h) Buying Them With Real Money - The biggest joke of them all. It's way too expensive to do this. You would have to pay $10 in real money just to buy the Empire State Building, which gives a small 10% boost to your business incomes. For $100, you would get 1600 game bucks, and that's not even close to enough to buy a popular out-of-area business. For me, The Mixer Bar in Paris (currently the most popular business in the game) costs about 32,000 in game bucks to franchise. Get this: that's $2,000 in real money!!! ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?
(2) The My Town Stock Exchange is totally broken.
Many players have realized that you can earn nearly infinite coins by converting all your businesses to offices, then building a bunch of Stock Exchanges. The fact is, Booyah dropped the ball big time here and people are taking serious advantage. These are the problems with the Stock Exchange:
(a) It's way too small. Most wonders take up an entire land parcel. The Stock Exchange is so small that you can fit 4 of them on a single parcel. That allows you to be able to put down a ton of them without sacrificing too much space.
(b) Giving a 20% boost to all of one building type is too strong for a wonder that can be bought in coins. The Championship Stadium is technically better than the Stock Exchange, but it costs 65 game bucks, it's much larger, and it's a limited edition item.
(c) It's too cheap. 30,000 coins? Ridiculous considering the boost. With 75 Stock Exchanges out, I was earning about 130 million coins PER BUILDING EVERY THREE MINUTES. On a cycle of like 25 buildings, we are talking over 3billion in coins collectively every 3 minutes. Do the math. That's silly stupid for an investment of a little more than 2 million coins for the 75 wonders.
(d) This is possible because of problem #4: the stupid things actually stack, so they keep getting incrementally better in numbers.
The solution here is either make the Stock Exchange cost bucks, make it not stack, or limit it to only 1 per town.
(3) There are power issues involving many of the other wonders.
The main issues here are the Statue of Liberty, the Intergalactic Spaceport, and the Lucky Chance Casino.
(a) Statue of Liberty - The most expensive wonder by far at 420 game bucks, and a total ripoff. 50,000 population bonus sounds great, but the price is too high. You could get the same result buying 5 power plants, which cost only coins. But the real downside to it comes when you look at the spaceport...
(b) Intergalactic Spaceport - It's way too good and way too cheap at 80 game bucks. A 20% population boost may not immediately sound great. At low levels when you have like 40,000 people, you are only getting a boost of 8,000. But this wonder rewards the late game player. When you have 400,000 people, suddenly the same wonder is giving you 80,000 people. So let's do the math. If you buy 5 Intergalactic Spaceports for 400 game bucks, you get a population boost of 400,000. That's 8 TIMES AS MUCH AS THE STATUE OF LIBERTY FOR LESS GAME BUCKS!!!
(c) Lucky Chance Casino - This one I really, really hate. The first two are clearly unbalanced, but this one...just wow. It literally DOES NOT DO ANYTHING TO HELP YOU. Let's look at what it actually does. First off, let me start by saying you have to spend $4 in real money to acquire it. Not coins, not game bucks, actual out of pocket cash. For a digital item in a free app. I'll admit it looks amazing and I bought one because of the visual kick-assness. I mean, it has a roulette fountain in the front, come on. But what it does is, it gives you a 5% chance of getting double coins when clicking on one of your properties. Do the math and you'll see that means that 1 out of 20 buildings will give you double coin payout. WHAT? That's incredibly minimal and weak, and no other wonder does so, so little. If one of your buildings even produced enough coins to make this effect decent (for instance, you have a lot of Stock Exchanges), then you already are getting so many coins that this "bonus" is simply irrelevant. If your buildings are producing like 150 or 200 coins a pop (pretty typical), then an extra 150 or 200 coins ONE OUT OF EVERY 20 TIMES YOU CLICK is just plain pathetic.
(4) There's simply not enough land to expand adequately.
Booyah has and will continue to rectify this problem, but the main issue I have here is, look at the damn size of the map. Booyah could be making our towns like 10 times the size they are and still have more room to expand. Why are they limiting us and then imposing lengthy wait times until releasing more plots? The folly is, every holiday or big event, they are releasing special items, but not more land. Plenty of players don't even bother building roads. Why? Because they take up too much damn room on the map. So in a game where the object is to build a dream town, you can't even be building roads if you want to keep dropping businesses and homes / community buildings and decorations. That's utter insanity. Give us the tools we need to succeed instead of imposing artificial limitations and handicaps.
(5) There's not enough choices to make distinctively different towns from one another.
This is a minor gripe, but still worth addressing. Yes, there are a lot of choices to choose from when building, but it's not enough. Too many of these towns look the same, because so many cool items are bucks-only and therefore prohibitive. And some of them just plain suck so that nobody will waste space on them. People should not mainly be building condos and high-rise condos when placing housing, but they kind of have to because those homes give the best population / income boost for their price. Yes, townhouses and lofts may look better and give flavor, but they are subpar buildings so they will not be used as much.
I personally use a lot of the "crap" buildings like the apartments and the Victorians because they fit my themes, but for the competitive player, they make no sense. People should not have towns full of subways and military barracks but these are small and give big boosts, so most players ignore that they are sacrificing vision and creativity. They simply do what makes the most sense to raising population so they can maximize their businesses.
Also, we are missing major things to flesh out the towns. Here's a few:
- chain link fences
- beaches
- tractors
- water spaces
- natural objects such as hills, mountains, and lakes
- bridges
- two-lane roads
- more street signs such as yield and caution
If you like this analysis and agree with my thoughts, show some support and write to Booyah telling them what you think. Also, comments and additional thoughts are certainly welcome.
