What a crazy game it was!  I don’t think any of us can say it was what we expected.

Some of us found ourselves absurdly addicted as the game made its way into our daily routines, others quickly dropped off the map as they found the game had veered off from the classical board game, still others took time to create tools and sites to help players make the most of the game.  Just about everyone suffered from the games technical issues and limitations.  And of course, plenty of people cheated.

I love the physical monopoly board game, and so being able to play with a massive number of people online was nostalgic and definitely had its moments.  Connecting with many other fans was also a definite plus as we adapted with new strategies as the game progressed.

Would I play the game again, if it was exactly the same? I’m a big fan, but I’d have to say no.

I think most of us stuck it through the last half of the game because we were already highly invested in it.  However, there were far too many glitches, holes, and gaming foundations that were missing in the game this round.

Now if Hasbro made an open commitment to listening to fans, taking everything they’ve learned and redesigning the game from the ground up, I’d definitely be there.  I’d even pay a few bucks.   (A few suggested features for starters)

Below are my stats to date, I can probably squeeze in another 13 billion if I can login tonight.  I tried to implement every tip that I had mentioned on this site.  I missed some days and may a couple glaring mistakes early on, but I’d say it was a fairly above average game.  I didn’t have any special mapping tools to score long streets so I had to pay tens of billions for most of mine.  Every street is maxed out, I probably could’ve went for buying even longer streets rather than a lot of streets in the ten million range.  But that’s what I was stuck with ultimately.

User: monopolyhq

Level: 6
Location: New Zealand
Score: $405,043,795,000
Money: $250,782,925,000

Related posts:

1. How Levels work in the game
2. Monopoly Here & Now: World Edition
3. Monopoly – For the love of the game

Breaking News: The Game we’ve loved to the point of complete frustration is ending in one week – December 9th.

Here’s the post from the original blog

We want to thank you, the loyal players, for making MONOPOLY City Streets a huge success. We know it’s been said many times, but it bears repeating – we are surprised, thrilled and honored with your response to this promotional introduction for the MONOPOLY City board game.

However, MONOPOLY City Streets game play will officially end on Wednesday, December 9.

We hope that you will enjoy spending the next several days negotiating, buying, selling and building right up until game play ends on December 9. And after the game ends, check out MONOPOLY City board game where you can continue building industrial complexes, skyscrapers or stadiums and sabotage your friends!

Thank you all for your passion and enthusiasm for MONOPOLY City Streets!

I’ll be posting last week strategies and reflections here shortly.

What’s your response so far?

Related posts:

1. Optimizing Your Game
2. First Day Insights to the New Game
3. Pre-Launch Game Strategy

By now most of you have a decent hang of the game and your own ‘system’ and ‘strategy’.  If not, definitely read up on some of the past posts here on monopoly hq.

This post will list out a few of the finer points to tweaking your game.  Keep in mind these are my own latest personal techniques and if you read through many of the comments and the chat wall on this site you’ll find plenty of other tips as well.

1.  The end date of the game has changed.

Originally the game was to end January 31st 2010, but the latest official FAQ states in December, and the general consensus seems to be the last day of the year.  This means your window for acquiring property with good return has shrunk if you want to have a decent return.  It also means if you plan on flipping streets you probably don’t want to wait till mid December as it won’t be all that valuable to anyone at that time.

2.  There are three new buildings to maximize your street.

spiral luxe $2.5m/1.05m
revolving restaurant $11m/2.1m
stairway to the future $60m/4.5m

The footprint seems smaller than their neighboring buildings, however I’ve got say the sky high towers are still the bulk of my building purchases.  Visit the tools page as some of the bots have been updated to reflect the new buildings.  Also see the building type specifications if you haven’t seen it already (if anyone has official specs on the new buildings let me know and I can update it)

3. Maximize your streets.

The 420 building limit is reportedly gone so you might want to focus on making existing streets more dense than acquiring streets right now.  However I’m still having problems on one of my streets for some reason.

Put your big buildings down first and squeeze in what you can from highest rent down.  This one is up for dispute and may depend on the shape of your street, but I generally fill with sky highs, then squeeze monopoly towers -> stairway to the future -> and for some reason there’s still room for some graduated megastructures.

5.  Examine streets before you buy.

There are some really expensive roads available for purchase that are actually really small.  Also, take note of streets that have duel paths close together.  While it’s great for putting green houses down each path, when you’re looking at the larger buildings with bigger payouts, they’ll generally take the width of both paths.  ie. that $25 million road will only have room for the equivalent of a $12.5 million dollar road generally.

6.  Strategically selling streets.

My gut feel is that it’s generally better to sell virgin undeveloped streets.  Everyone’s got their own way of playing and building up, and probably don’t care to be bothered with building over your junk.  You can possibly trick a few players into buying a street due to the added value of your properties, but for the most part people are looking for long streets, not purchasing buildings they can buy themselves at any point.

If you plan on selling anyways, at least wait till the end of the day for the highest bid, and then accept right before the next day begins, so you don’t need to pay for unnecessary tax on that street.

7.  Stay off the leaderboard.

If you’re at the bottom edge of the leaderboard and you’re sitting on a pile of cash, it’s safest to make some offers on streets you don’t mind owning anyways, as the cash offered up will instantly decrease your score until your offer is rejected.

8.  Avoid chance card bombs.

If you’re not a savvy street broker, and you need to build property to earn rent like me, well you need to take your chances at some point.  It really depends on where you’re at in the game and how much rent you’re taking in, but I generally use all my cash for trades.  I leave myself 1-2 billion for buildings.  For some reason I find when I’ve found that when I have that little cash on hand (while being substantial enough to build out), billion dollar accounting errors are much less likely.

No related posts.

Finally an official update. This is a straight copy and paste, I wanted to leave open for the discussion with the community here.

AN OPEN LETTER FROM HASBRO
First, we want to thank everyone for their open and honest feedback on MONOPOLY City Streets. It has certainly been an eventful few weeks

We want you to know that we have been listening to your input from the very first day MONOPOLY City Streets launched. We may not always have an answer and we’ve made some missteps along the way. Regardless, we want to take this opportunity to set the record straight about the purpose of the game and the game play itself.

First, some background.

When we undertook this project, many months back, our objective was to design and deliver a free game that would be a fun, interactive, promotional introduction to our new board game, MONOPOLY City. We wanted to bring to life some of the new elements of game play that we’d introduced in the MONOPOLY City board game, like 3-D construction, hazards, and bonus buildings.

This concept, which came to life by working with Google Maps, has been a runaway success. We were surprised and thrilled at the sheer number of people who were excited about playing the world’s favourite game on a global scale. We vastly underestimated our initial hosting needs, which meant many people experienced a very slow or non-existent start to the game. In response, we increased our hardware investment and the game pace picked up.

As many of you now understand, the initial design wasn’t meant to be a massive multiplayer online game; it was meant to be a fun free game to spark interest in the MONOPOLY City board game. There is no end result or ultimate prize when you play MONOPOLY City Streets online. The only goal is having fun while you play. As the online game has picked up momentum, our development team have been working, often around the clock, to improve play, fix bugs, and combat cheating with the ultimate aim of creating a competitive, fair environment so all who come can experience and enjoy MONOPOLY City-type game play.

Because our game is designed for the broad MONOPOLY family audience, we can’t and don’t collect e-mail addresses, and this left us more vulnerable to cheater attack. In addition, the devotion of serious players led a lot of people to spend a lot of time setting up multiple accounts, creating alliances and building BOTS. For this, we simply weren’t prepared.

Because these issues affected game play, we clarified the rules, posted new rules on the blog, and explained our position on multiple accounts — and have since been going through a process of deleting multiple accounts. We are being thorough, doing our best not to delete genuine players, and we expect to continue to delete problem accounts through the rest of the game. We are following up on e-mails and blog posts that tell us about cheaters, but we have not been as quick as we would have liked in telling players what we’ve been doing about their complaints.

We appreciate the enthusiasm this community has shown for our game. In fact, we love it. We know a lot of people are convinced that this is a beta for a bigger game, but (honest!) we never intended the online game to last beyond its intended promotional period this Fall. That’s why we didn’t plan for the kind of development dialogue that players expect of an MMOG and, in fact, we didn’t originally plan to have a blog. It’s taken us a while to gather the resources needed to engage the community. We’ll continue to listen to suggestions but we have no plans to further change game rules during the promotion period. Because of the overwhelming enthusiasm and popularity of the game, we’re reviewing our options for the future, but no decision has been made..

We have updated the Frequently Asked Questions with responses to many of the questions that we continue to see on the blog and that we have received through e-mail.

We will continue to develop MONOPOLY City Streets and keep improving game play over coming weeks. We hope that people appreciate the MONOPOLY City Streets online game for what it is, and what it was always meant to be, a fun free experience taster of the MONOPOLY City board game.

What are you thoughts?

Related posts:

1. Monopoly Here & Now: World Edition
2. State of the Game
3. Breaking News: The Game Ends in One Week

It’s been almost a month since Monopoly City Streets launched.


Here’s your chance to brag, rant, and share where you’re at in the game right now.

The current in-game leaderboard doesn’t exactly reflect the true standings, and some of you I know are also hesitant with revealing your official monopoly city streets name to the public – so you can do so here anonymously if you’d like.  (though at sometime if we’re going to form alliances, names sure would help)

I haven’t logged in today but here’s where I’m at:

- Level 5,  score of about 4 billion
- I’ve had to abandon early local streets that were more meaningful to me.  Currently I’ve got 6 or 7 streets not to any one particular region in the world
- all streets cleared and revamped for higher returns.
- The only tool I’ve been actively using so far has been Monopoly City Street bot Script
- Receiving the occasional attacks, no constant and ongoing enemies, but feel it may be ramping up

What about you?

Tax obviously becomes a big factor for most people at this stage, how are you optimizing your game?  Are you actively using your destroy/hazard cards?  Do you have unprovoked enemies that have declared war on you?  Are you in an existing alliance?

I’d love to hear from you, go ahead and shout out in the comments!

No related posts.

This is Day 23 since Monopoly City Streets went public to the world – integrating present day streets through google maps and a beloved childhood game for many.

The concept is simply brilliant.

… but we’ve definitely had a number of setbacks and challenges along the way, wouldn’t you say?

A brief history. A massive amount of hype on gaming sites and technology sites like Mashable brings millions to the game day one. The servers are overwhelmed bringing the game to a complete halt. Since then if I recall correctly there’s been one full slate-cleaning reset, two major mid-game rule changes, and at least three unannounced shutdowns due to maintenance. Some people out of complete frustration have left the game filled with hate for hasbro, still others remain addicted.

Gameplay. At this point in the game I’m estimating that most people who have stuck it out and used tips and strategies outlined on this site have at least five decent streets and are generating at least a few hundred million dollars each day. Many cheaters have been eliminated by they remain a reality in the game (ie. the leader-board and players making billions with no viable property).

Taxes have ‘helped’ level the playing field a bit as the game strategy shifts towards optimizing property on streets you have. I still can’t imagine many new players falling in love with the game at this point though as street selection is limited and there is virtually no way of catching up as the rich get richer.

At this point in the game, I also can’t imagine playing the game without some tools and scripts. Monopoly should remain about strategy and not how much time you can invest into clicking buttons to place property.

Game Development. The hasbro / monopoly team has taken quite a lot of bad flack throughout the course of this game. And while I can understand the complexities of something at this scale, and the unexpected interest, some of the badgering is rightfully so.

The game is free, and there will naturally be some glitches and growth pains, but I think the root of the PR nightmare is the lack of communication. Tiny teasers followed by complete silence is a horrible way of keeping people engaged. ie. is there now a selling cap? did something change with the chance card opportunities? are you silently working on creating new and amazing features to this game?

The Future. I remain hopeful about the game. Mostly because of the fans and the monopoly community itself. They’ll demand a better game, and one will come eventually, even if it’s a different open sourced version. If Hasbro got their act together, they would be able to see this as beyond a marketing and branding initiative but grasp that there can be an actual business model in the game worth investing in.

The community here and at many other fan sites has really enhanced the game. I’m amazed by the level of tips and tools that people have put time into sharing. We’re currently compiling a list of future features section we’re hoping that the development team can strongly consider implementing.

What are your thoughts so far? Is the damage done by cheaters irreparable? Is there any way there might be dramatic shifts in the leaderboards? Are we secretly beta users? What’s a must-have feature/change in the next release of the game?

Related posts:

1. First Day Insights to the New Game
2. An Open Letter from Hasbro
3. Final thoughts on the first ever global monopoly game

Here’s the official update from the development team:

As promised, we have been working to combat foul play in the game and have begun correcting anomalies which have been used by a few to inflate their MONOPOLY City Streets coffers.

Last week, in the interest of adding more excitement to game play, we increased the value of many of the streets when we relaunched the game. However, as a result, rental income on the most expensive streets grew exponentially. During the past 24 hours, we have adjusted the rental income multiplier to correct overinflated rents which some have exploited in their quest to become a real estate mogul.

We did not take away any income from the past several days, but you will notice that starting at the most recent payday, you did receive reduced rents on your buildings. Over the course of several days, this adjustment will once again level the playing field among all players.

The incentive to buy bigger – and more expensive – streets remains overall, as those streets have more potential for development (and thus more rent) over the course of the game. So, you may have to adjust your buying and building strategy and begin negotiating with other players to get to the higher levels of the game.

We apologize for not posting the update about rent before the change was made to the game. But, we are confident that this change will be in the best interest of all players.

Next up in the quest to combat cheaters: deletion of accounts.

What are your thoughts?  What’s your strategy going forward?

Related posts:

1. An Open Letter from Hasbro
2. First Day Insights to the New Game

I was about to post some more awesome tips and strategies, when it looks like word is out that they have taken out the rent multiplier for streets over a million dollars.

Needless to say this is a huge change in strategy for people, and an awful waste of time for those who’ve invested in tweaking their game play. Changing the rules of a game mid-way and then unannounced on top of that is just about as bad as the hundreds of active cheaters in the game. This is going to be horrendous PR for Monopoly City Streets.

My only hope is that this is a momentary glitch. Send your ‘fan mail’ to the official site, their official email monopolycitysts@gmail.com, and their twitter account http://twitter.com/monopolycitysts.

This needs to get fixed, changed immediately. I’m not sure how much fans can handle another reset.

Related posts:

1. An Open Letter from Hasbro
2. Rent Calculator – Is your next street worth it?

Congrats first go out to the Monopoly City Streets team for their efforts in listening and responding to the thousands of requests and issues brought up during the first week.  And great job upgrading the hardware, things are looking smooth with the initial onslaught.

1. Some people are still reporting issues registering into the game.  Supposedly the recommendation is to try buying your initial street in the U.S. but that doesn’t seem like a good permanent solution to me.

2. I’m really glad their monitoring cheating, it’ll be incredibly sad if millions of people put time into the game, only to have 10 cheaters on top of the leader board.  They’re clearly trying to stomp out loopholes like protecting streets in negotations and not being able to remove hazards from other player’s streets.

3. There are tons of million plus streets available, and will probably continue, with the game slowed down due to taxing and enforcement against cheaters

4.  I thought I recalled before the reset that smaller streets had houses for less, ie. green house for 35k, but now they seem to be 50k across the board.

5. Rental returns are much much more granular.  From what I can tell as a very general rule of thumb, using a $million dollar street as the baseline, the green house / city cottage will get 1:1 returns.  A street valued at half of that, will get rental rates of half or a street triple in value with have triple the returns.  ie. the Road to Hana in Maui, which costs 9.28 million (while i can’t purchase it, yet, and verify), a 50k green house will get roughly 464k in daily rent!

6. They’re really trying to keep players active in the game – ie. every day you can get $1million, and your rental returns – only if you log in.  Trades are auto-accepted if ignored for 7 days.  And all your property gets repossessed in 14 days if inactive!  Don’t plan on being offline on vacation.

I’ll post some early initial strategy with the new rules soon as well.

Related posts:

1. Final thoughts on the first ever global monopoly game
2. Day One Strategy
3. Pre-Launch Game Strategy

I was really hoping for at least some way of reducing multiple accounts and rent multipliers for neighboring/intersecting streets… but the following changes for the reset will have to do. According to the official blog:

A short summary of some key changes:

Streets can only change hands ONCE per day
In other words, no street can be bought or sold more than once per day. So, be wise about your street selection.

Bidding Cap Removed
For level 3 players and above, we have removed the bidding cap of M1.5 million on streets. Have fun.

Addition of “For Sale” signs
Having a hard time finding a street to purchase? Now when viewing the zoomed out map, you will see red “for sale” signs that will indicate where streets are available. Click on the sign to visit the neighborhood and buy, buy, buy.

Tax
There is only one certainty in MONOPOLY City Streets. Tax. Just like in real life, tax now plays an integral part of the game. The first 5 streets that you own are tax-free. The current tax rate is 3% per street. For example, if you own 15 streets your tax will be 30% of your total rent collected every day. If you own 25 streets your tax will be 60%, etc.

Street Protection
Many of you noticed that if there is an offer made on a street, it was protected from hazards and the bulldozer while the street is under negotiation. No longer. Streets will no longer be protected when they are included in negotiations.

Forced Repossession of Streets
It pays to play regularly. If, after 2 weeks, there has not been any activity on your account, the bank will automatically repossess ALL your streets. Ouch. So, keep buying, building and negotiating – you never know what chance has in store for you…

For the updated guidelines click here.

I’ll post some strategy with all of this in mind real soon.  But one thing for certain is the tax will dramatically change and moderate the game.  With 3% tax per additional street after 5 streets, means you can own 38 streets fully loaded, and earn nothing.  Long streets you can build over time will be essential!

Related posts:

1. Bonus Building Loophole