Update Update 1.40

[DeletedUser]

Agreed. This completely screws up the balance for those of us who take the time and do the math to have the balance of coins, supplies and happiness that works best for us.
AID would be perfect if each player could set a list of their own priorities or prefrences.

 

[DeletedUser99588]

This AID function has been rushed through beta to cover up the fact that they have removed the option to turn the hardware accelerator off which they announced the day before the update. There were a number of complaints on beta which have been ignored and I think it was tested for maybe a week before going live with it yesterday.

Adds fuel to the fire that EN server is little more than an extended beta for the rest of the servers. I think the majority of players would be happy with a compromise that decorations are the last thing to be polivated in your city. i.e. after everything else has been motivated or polished. Things like HoF and certain buildings you might want done first I guess it isn't unreasonable to have to make a few agreements with other players to do them manually.

 

[DeletedUser3315]

I really love this feature. I woke up this morning to find:

Korch (large guild, small friend list) - 28/28 houses motivated, 8/8 supplies motivated, 5/6 cultural buildings polished, 2/2 special buildings motivated and 1/1 decos polished
Houndsmoor (no guild, med friends list) - 8/13 Houses mot, 4/7 supplies mot, 4/4 cult pol, 2/2 spec build mot & 4/8 decos polished
Cirgard (med, active guild, med friend list) - 10/10 houses mot, 10/10 supplies mot, 7/8 cult pol, 2/6 spec buildings mot & 7/11 decos polished

That is a huge increase on normal level's and although some decorations have been polished they are not targeted above any of the other items in terms of ratio's and the overall result is a huge uplift in motivations of the buildings and overall production. I can take a few decos being polished.

If you really hate your decs being polished just dont have current age decs - its not exactly difficult is it? My only issue is that the aid button tends to ignore my kings / queens and HOF's which is a little frustrating. As an active m/p er this also saves me ahuge amount of time personally which is great so overall very happy.

 

[Praeceptor]

I really love this feature. I woke up this morning to find:

Korch (large guild, small friend list) - 28/28 houses motivated, 8/8 supplies motivated, 5/6 cultural buildings polished, 2/2 special buildings motivated and 1/1 decos polished
Houndsmoor (no guild, med friends list) - 8/13 Houses mot, 4/7 supplies mot, 4/4 cult pol, 2/2 spec build mot & 4/8 decos polished
Cirgard (med, active guild, med friend list) - 10/10 houses mot, 10/10 supplies mot, 7/8 cult pol, 2/6 spec buildings mot & 7/11 decos polished

That is a huge increase on normal level's and although some decorations have been polished they are not targeted above any of the other items in terms of ratio's and the overall result is a huge uplift in motivations of the buildings and overall production. I can take a few decos being polished.

If you really hate your decs being polished just dont have current age decs - its not exactly difficult is it? My only issue is that the aid button tends to ignore my kings / queens and HOF's which is a little frustrating. As an active m/p er this also saves me ahuge amount of time personally which is great so overall very happy.

Without going in to detail, I have found the same thing. All 5 of my cities (including the ones with decs!) are much more productive today.

This is definitely a good feature.

 

[DeletedUser99588]

If you really hate your decs being polished just dont have current age decs

The problem is it will still polish older decorations before motivating newer buildings.

 

[DeletedUser1081]

The problem is it will still polish older decorations before motivating newer buildings.

The other problem is that the design/development team haven't clarified why they want us to eliminate a whole category of structure from our towns, and several of our fearless moderators have evidently felt obligated to insist that we are not expected to do that even though they can see that that's precisely what people are doing and advising others to do.

Like several others here I have decorations when I like the look of them (and/or want to hide buildings I hate the look of), not because I ever want or need to have them polished. I never want/need *anything* polished because not needing polishing is my idea of a good layout. If the silly progreamming of the "aid" feature is a deliberate "new challenge" to get us to redesign our cities I want to be told that by the CoMa or Co-CoMas, and I want to know what the reasons for it are.

 

[DeletedUser99588]

Well mink I think maybe the developers haven't looked further than a quick buck. The diamond offer for those buildings that get highest priority using AID button has arrived the day after they rushed it into EN server.

 

[DeletedUser98465]

The other problem is that the design/development team haven't clarified why they want us to eliminate a whole category of structure from our towns, and several of our fearless moderators have evidently felt obligated to insist that we are not expected to do that even though they can see that that's precisely what people are doing and advising others to do.

Like several others here I have decorations when I like the look of them (and/or want to hide buildings I hate the look of), not because I ever want or need to have them polished. I never want/need *anything* polished because not needing polishing is my idea of a good layout. If the silly progreamming of the "aid" feature is a deliberate "new challenge" to get us to redesign our cities I want to be told that by the CoMa or Co-CoMas, and I want to know what the reasons for it are.

I think i said previously that I have no regard either way to the feature, but I will admit two things. a) whether it's some perception from an ease perspective or not, or indeed it's 'shiny and new' so lets click it, but I've never been so polivated since I was in a fully fledged mot/pol managed guild and b) I have actually removed the few decorations and to an extent things like 2x2 items because I have no desire these are polished and priorities for me are different.

 

[DeletedUser3315]

Regarding the deco being polished issue - i think its probably something to do with the way the basic game differentiates between buildings. For example, when you receive a quest along the lines of 'sell two buildings from your previous/current age' you can achieve this quest by selling decorations (thus saving significant costs). This suggests to me that decorations are coded as buildings across the game. Therefore its probably very difficult to write an algorithm to distinguish between buildings and decs without re-writing large parts of code. I could very easily be wrong though.

 

[DeletedUser99588]

Could be RitzyD. Surely they would have told us that during the extensive testing and feedback it got in beta world

Sorry but even though your thoughts could be a valid reason it is no excuse for rushing it through beta and not taking the time to iron out bugs and explain clearly how and why it works they way it does even though the end result will be that for the majority decorations will become a thing of the past.

Not having decorations doesn't really bother me although I appreciate others like the aesthetics of them but it seems odd the development team go to all that effort in creating many different decorations including special event ones for them to then to introduce something that will encourage players not to have them.

 

[DeletedUser15432]

Fantastic - 37 minutes to AID all guild mates and all friends on ALL 10 worlds this means that I will be able to do other things besides polivate on all worlds on a daily basis

 

[DeletedUser2989]

The "Aid" button has worked better than I hoped for me, I don't even have to get rid of decorations (I might have to get more) as I don't have enough buildings as it is for everyone to P/M me...

The coding element is an interesting one, without knowing the coding they are using or how complex it has gotten with so many features added on top of features it's hard to say exactly how hard it would be for the code to distinguish between decos and other buildings. I would think there is some form of tag that they could get the "aid" button to identify that tells it "x,y and z" are decos and thus to leave till last.

For the record, I've read through all the 32 pages of this thread &, yes, I've seen the commonly used defense for this "It's not a replacement to manually polivating" Do you seriously believe that?

Well I believe it I still manually polivated about half or more of my guild as they had preferences up, those with no preference got an "aid" (not much different from what they got from me). It really just depends on how each player uses it.

 

[bs0877]

I can only add my backing to the complaints about the new aid button.
It encourages "Drive Past" assistance with no regard to what you want to do.
While it will encourage those who are too lazy to do a proper assistance, it means those who did previously put the effort (over an hr a night) to help friends now have less chance of getting the BPs they need as a lazy clicker will likely have taken the top era buildings.
Why not go the whole hog and have a "Motivate all friends, hoods and guilds" button and be done with it. You can then have a "Play the game for me" button so I don't even have to log on.

The Aid button is too easy and makes for lazy players, remove it.

 

[DeletedUser5180]

Well mink I think maybe the developers haven't looked further than a quick buck. The diamond offer for those buildings that get highest priority using AID button has arrived the day after they rushed it into EN server.

Could you expand on this please, I'm able to access the forums but not the game while at work and so I'm not aware of what diamond offer has appeared.?

 

[DeletedUser105687]

I think the other important thing that the developers "forgot" whilst designing this "Aid" button is yes it makes it a lot easier to Polish/Motivate someone but the main reason we do it is to get something in return i.e. BPs of relevant GBs. If I am in EMA and looking for EMA or HMA BPs, by pressing the Aid button on say a PE player, all I have done is Polish/Motivate PE items (decos etc) so I will never have the chance to get EMA or HMA BPs. This will defeat the reason why a lot of players have buildings across the Ages so there is something for everyone !

 

[DeletedUser]

UPDATE

I want to confirm that as regard to the aid button. When there is not anything to mot or pol you can still use this at the moment. I have been chasing this and I can now confirm this is a bug, and a jira has been made for this. I am hoping a fix will be done asap.

 

[DeletedUser2989]

I think the other important thing that the developers "forgot" whilst designing this "Aid" button is yes it makes it a lot easier to Polish/Motivate someone but the main reason we do it is to get something in return i.e. BPs of relevant GBs. If I am in EMA and looking for EMA or HMA BPs, by pressing the Aid button on say a PE player, all I have done is Polish/Motivate PE items (decos etc) so I will never have the chance to get EMA or HMA BPs. This will defeat the reason why a lot of players have buildings across the Ages so there is something for everyone !

I believe this is why it is still possible to manually visit people and specifically target certain age buildings, thus people can still build lower age buildings for people to find BP's as those looking can still manually visit and P/M them. The "aid" button is not intended to be the perfect BP hunting tool.

 

[DeletedUser105176]

As much as people can say it's no replacement for actively mot/pol, and while that's true... it doesn't change the fact that 95% of people who tended my city yesterday 'aided' instead of visited, leaving vital buildings alone. It could be that people are trying out the feature for the first day, or it could be people are now really lazy and take the easy way out.

Yes I've had a lot of new friends added just because of aiding, but for eg, my haunted house and king was untouched meaning I lost 10,000 coins and instead got 10-15 people motivating 1h houses which gave me a bonus of about 1400-2000 coins. So I'm behind, because of the priority system aiding uses. And if I were to remove those 1h for 8h houses, overall it'd still be a lot less coins as I can generally collect every hour.

 

[DeletedUser99588]

Lol, so amazed that the developers can turn a positive and good idea into a negative. All they had to do was ensure decorations were lower down the pecking order and the vast majority of complaints would never have occurred. In fact it could have been one of those few times when they received a higher proportion of praise.

Those who like to make their cities pretty would be happy. Most others would be pleased to see their main structures receive aid first and you would just be left with those that think its making the game to easy to contend with.

 

[DeletedUser2989]

As much as people can say it's no replacement for actively mot/pol, and while that's true... it doesn't change the fact that 95% of people who tended my city yesterday 'aided' instead of visited, leaving vital buildings alone. It could be that people are trying out the feature for the first day, or it could be people are now really lazy and take the easy way out.

Yes I've had a lot of new friends added just because of aiding, but for eg, my haunted house and king was untouched meaning I lost 10,000 coins and instead got 10-15 people motivating 1h houses which gave me a bonus of about 1400-2000 coins. So I'm behind, because of the priority system aiding uses. And if I were to remove those 1h for 8h houses, overall it'd still be a lot less coins as I can generally collect every hour.

It is very possible that what we are seeing right now is that rush to try it out (depending on how many people tried it out on beta before this...), I'd expect things will settle over the next few weeks as we either get used to the "aid" coming in or start to work out who we are going to manually visit and P/M and who we are going to be lazy and "aid". A lot really depends on what people observe over the next week, we'll probably find people forming "manual visit" groups to ensure their important buildings that are otherwise getting missed receive some P/M's.