Yesterday's updates

As you likely noticed, we took the game off line for some time yesterday to implement a few updates. As part of our ongoing effort to continuously improve game play, we added an update to correct inconsistent data relating to streets involved in offers. This should correct the problem that some were seeing about streets appearing to be owned by one player when in fact should have been released to another player.

Additionally, we’re doing more to discourage cheating and have implemented new tools to automate tracking these players. As a result, you’ll notice that hundreds of thousands of abandoned properties have been returned to the bank and are now available for purchase.

In the near future, we also plan to implement a few additional improvements, including addressing the long street building issue so that we can lift building limits on the longer streets.

Thanks for your ongoing patience.

Sorry!

We’re hard at work fixing some of the street data mismatches that a number of you have reported. Unfortunately, it’s taking a bit longer than expected. We’ll expect to be back up and running within 3 hours.

Monday 26 October Maintenance Window

We are aware that some of you have been experiencing issues with streets that have offers attached to them. This is due to corrupt data which occurred when one of our databases went offline. We’ve tried fixing this without interrupting your game play, however to correct some inconsistencies we need to take the game offline for maintenance.

We expect the maintenance window to last between 4 – 8 hours from 8am, GMT Monday 26 October. During this maintenance window we will conduct a full review of the current data set to identify any inconsistencies.

There are 2 main inconsistencies we have indentified with the current data set that we will resolve.

Firstly there are some streets that have been involved in the offer process that are currently in a state of 'limbo’. In this state you can see a street in your portfolio, you own it, but you cannot currently build on it. Once we have run our repairs you will be able to build again.

Secondly, some players own a street but it is not appearing in their property list, again due to lost data from database downtime.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to improve the game.

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.

An update from the development team

The databases that control the map area for East Coast US experienced problems on Saturday, which would’ve caused some players data loss or limited access. Please note this is running normally again.

Occasionally users who are playing fair but fast have seen a slow down message, this is a throttle in place to stop the unfair advantage players with multiple accounts may have. Please note, there has been no rule change regarding the numbers of buildings you can build, we have, however, added a temporary fix while we work out the issue affecting long streets. Users who try and build multiple buildings on long streets may get an error message saying they’ve reached their limit. When this message appears depends on the street and location. However, is not a rule change and should only affect those with very long streets who are building, demolishing and then building again. We're sorry if occasionally good players get caught by this, but we're trying our best to make it as fair as possible and minimize the opportunities for people to take unfair advantage of the game mechanics.

As the result of us continually working in the background to improve the game, you may experience slowness or may not be able to access your account from time to time. We apologize in advance if this catches you off guard. If you experience these problems, please try again soon.

Technical issues

In the early hours of this morning (GMT) the database shard for the East coast of the US ran into difficulties, it was restored at 7am. We are continuing to work on the system to restore stability.

We are aware of the problem of buildings going missing and we will be releasing an update on Monday, data corruption has occurred on some long streets with larger quantities of buildings but we are working continuously with your feedback to improve this.