City-planner

It would be nice if it was possible to 'hire' a city-planner. When you start the game for the first time then you should be given the opportunity to choose a city-planner (an 'old' player) - then as new you always (hopefully) have one nearby who can help you out with the problems you may have as a new player.

You could be given the opportunity to choose from different kind of time-interval/days - that way to make sure that both are online at the same time.

To motivate the 'old' players to be a city-planner there could be some kind of gift-exchange.
The city-planner could ex. give houses or decorations and the new player could give some special coins which the city-planner could use to buy special buildings and decorations.

 

Neat idea. But, I would think altruism would be better. Any way the forum does give you a means of tapping into the minds of several of the greatest minds and players around for free. True you are dependent on getting them to be interested in your issue. For example you kimmi have been very successful at this.

The real tough part is getting new players to be active in the forum.

 

Yes it is - but fortunately there are a lot of helpfull players in this BP game - so maybe all we need is to get them to use this forum.

 

An online chat box would probably help with what you are thinking here.
I think most people would be happy to help for nothing. If its a chat box then you get people who are online, and you might get a bit of discussion.

 

A chat box would be fun and a lot faster than the forum when looking for assistance.

 

when a higher account sends stuff to a lower account to enhance its progress is called pushing and its against game rules. there are plenty facebook games that do that, no need for such nonsense here.

 

I'm not familiar with the term 'pushing' - but I cann't see any harm if it's possible to 'give' decorations/residents which cost about 500-1000 cc - depending on the receivers lv - since you - I think it was from lv1-10 - having a hard time keeping the mood at 75% and earning enough cc to buy decorations.

 

I know the phenomenon as 'twinking', although it's not entirely the same as what you presented since the helper would be getting some kind of reward. I don't like incentive-based systems like that, honestly. It's practically a pyramid-scheme. This game isn't even complicated enough to need in-game helpers. The tasks that act as tutorials are adequate, and the forum is a fine resource. If people ignore the tutorial and forums, then what can you do? This game is about managing, albeit lightly. If you dig yourself into a hole in this game, it's probably because you didn't manage properly, because you didn't heed the tutorials, and/or have bad impulse control.

As for why twinking is considered bad, well, in a game like this it deprives possible income from the developers. If I give a ton of my excess decorations away, those're decoration that they might not buy with MM. Twinking is often done in MMOs to pass hard-earned and rare equipment to another character, especially an alternate character of the player. Some people find it unfair, but it was earned anyway so it doesn't really matter and saves the player time. That isn't bad considering the often considerable investment needed to obtain said items, but that's my opinion, and there are varying levels of control on it. Of course you'll have beggars asking for items too, and that can bring the game down, which brings me to…

In-game chat. No. Please. Or let me hide it. Especially in a casual game. I can imagine it, and what I imagine isn't pretty. People have expressed a lot of dislike for any potential gifting feature, and it ties in closely to twinking in the bad way. Already the people that post in section asking for neighbors tend to never post elsewhere, and they probably only do it thinking they'll get something, not even noticing how limited the neighbor feature is right now.

Or maybe I'm just pessimistic. I would like to be able to trade permits in any case. I sure have some excess.