Reduced Market Prices: Generosity or Identity Theft?

If you’ve been in the RC marketplace lately, you’ve probably noticed rock bottom sale prices for beams, raspberries and rolls. The prices for these items are so deeply gouged that it makes it hard to resist buying them. Should you stock up now and wait for prices to rise with an eye toward resale, or should you question the motive behind these tempting offers?
I, for one, question the motives behind these strange discount sales because something isn’t quite right here. And, if something isn’t quite right, then it’s quite wrong. Here’s why I think something sinister is afoot:

Red Flag #1:
In a previous post I called attention to the strange price drop of beams, raspberries and rolls. A kindly player responded to my post and informed me that long-time players were quitting the game and liquidating their inventories at fire-sale prices for the benefit of remaining players. Wow, such philanthropy. Too bad there’s nothing to substantiate these claims. I checked recent RC forum posts. Although there are posts that SPECULATE long-time players are leaving and sharing the fruit of their labors; to date, no long term player has actually posted anything in the forums saying, “I’m quitting, buy my stuff at sale prices.” Nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. DON’T FALL FOR THE RUMORS.

Red Flag #2:
I went into the RC marketplace and clicked on the link for beams. There were two items for sale. One was a listing for 1,000,000 beams!!!! Another was a listing for 555,555 beams!!!



That’s a lot of wood, folks. In fact, that’s so much wood that it raised an eyebrow and forced me to ask the question: what does it take to produce 1,000,000 beams. The answer will startle you.
Assuming your mills are at their maximum level, which is 3, each mill can produce 32 beams in one hour. You have a maximum of 5 mills. 5 mills X 32 units per mill = 160 beams produced per hour. To produce 1,000,000 beams at that rate requires 6,250 straight hours with no sleep, no going to work and no time between production finish and production restart (in other words, you start production again immediately after it finishes). 6,250 hours equals 260.4167 days STRAIGHT, NO SLEEP, NO GOING TO WORK AND NO LAG TIME BETWEEN PRODUCTION. In other words, it’s not possible to produce 1,000,000 beams in 260 ½ days- it takes longer than that. How much longer? The average person holds a 40 hour a week job that requires them to not be playing RC while working, and the average person requires 8 hours of sleep. Accounting for an hour a day drive time to and from work, grocery shopping, etc., it would take an average person 781.25 days to produce 1,000,000 beams. That’s 2 years, and 2 months, roughly. That’s not factoring in the time and beams it takes to construct the buildings required to produce the production points needed to make the beams, or the time it takes to buy the plots of land necessary to place those buildings upon. By my estimate, it takes AT LEAST 3 years of regular game play to build your city to a point where it is feasible to produce 1,000,000 beams. So, these “long-time” players would have to be playing RC since 2012 in order to bring you the sweet deals you see in the marketplace. Has Rising Cities been around since 2012?
This is also assuming that only one player is offering those 1,000,000 beams in the marketplace. What if the same player is also offering the 555,555 beams? Though it is possible for a player to produce 1,000,000 (or 1,555,555) beams, it seems highly improbable that numbers like that can be achieved without hacking into the game code. And, speaking of hacking….

Conclusions:
I only see four possibilities for the strange RC marketplace price manipulations.

1) The game developers are behind it. Perhaps it’s their way of saying thank you for playing the game, although strange they aren’t telling us about it.

2) A “long-time” player, or players, have produced beams, raspberries and rolls legitimately. Why gouge the market with just these three items? Why not flood the market with other goods? Easy. Beams, raspberries and rolls are three of the most common items used by buildings for generating production points, education points and bonus coins; they are three of the four easiest items to sell in the marketplace (the fourth being bricks). By flooding the marketplace with these items, the player or players responsible have destroyed your ability to make easy money in the marketplace. They have killed a fat portion of your city’s economy. So, why not bricks in this scenario? Easy. Bricks are big money. If the price of bricks was suddenly reduced from 8,000 coins to 500 coins, players would complain. If players complained, it would draw the attention of moderators and game developers who would investigate the situation, possibly bringing unwanted attention to those responsible for the price manipulation.

3) One or more people are exploiting a game bug or have hacked into the game code enabling them to “produce” an outrageous amount of goods without spending the necessary time or production points required to obtain them.

4) This is a clever identity theft scam. You: “WOW! 750 coin beams for 180 coins!!! Sweet!!!! I’m all in!!!!” >Click<. Congratulations, you just gave someone access to your computer and all the information on it. Not to mention the possibility of allowing them to install a virus on your hard drive.

There’s an old saying: “If it’s too good to be true, it usually is.”

I strongly suggest we have our forum moderators and game developers look into this strange marketplace abnormality. They need to give us the thumbs up or thumbs down regarding the legitimacy of these offerings before we proceed to take advantage of what may very well be a trap.

 

It looks as if an enormous amount of roof tiles and regular tiles can also be purchased at the moment. And no offer whatsoever for raspberries so either that "too good to be true" offer has been taken, or withdrawn...

 

Clearly, RC is behind the crazy price fluctuations going on in the marketplace of recent, or ..there's a hacker out there, who's gotten access to RC internal code (which is unlikely). I personally acquired over 1,450,000 beams, as result of this manipulation. I think I bought most of mine @150 each.

The only building materials in the marketplace that haven't fluctuated wildly in recent days, are bricks and cork. Bricks are still at ridiculously high levels, with their prices fluctuating very little. I think RC has deliberately left bricks for last, because they know bricks are the newbie's bread and butter, for generating metro coins to purchase other items.

Because the price of beams, roof tiles, and checkered floor tiles had gone through the roof, I believe many newbie's had been leaving anyway. Just take a look at the number of users on line at any one given time, they're almost non-existent. I predicted this would happen over four years ago, and predicted these building material shortages would kill this game.

This all happened because the previous RC owners did such a poor job with their math calculations when creating the expansion of this game. They neglected to consider just how many additional building materials would be needed after adding each new playing field. Each time they added a playing field, they put additional stress on an already limited manufacturing base, which was originally created for the first two playing fields.

Instead of stopping and fixing this problem, RC just kept adding more playing fields to keep their players from leaving the game. But never thought to add additional meaningful manufacturing facilities to meet the demand of these new playing fields, as a growing city.

As players poured into the market place to purchase and make up for these shortages, they drove the price of bricks from a couple hundred bucks, to well over 7000 and way beyond. The other building material prices followed right along side the brick prices. At one point, I remember selling black-n-white checkered floor tiles for 24,000 each.

To put it bluntly, RC did not have the appropriate gaming engineers to figure this all out, before adding all these additional playing fields. The early players gave RC plenty of warnings about this issue, as complaints came pouring-in nearly five years ago. But RC chose to ignore them.

I have no doubt, that thousands, if not tens of thousands of previous players abandoned their game, once they realize how hard it would be to acquire the building material needed to finish their cities. And, the rest my friends is history.

What RC is attempting to do now, is nothing less than trying to "cover-up" a very big wound with a "VERY SMALL BANDAID".

Just my humble thoughts!

 

Thank you for letting us know. We are passing this along to the developers to figure out. We will announce when they get back to us with an explanation or answer.