Monopoly Hotels' 12 days of Christmas!

No, I am not making this up - that image is from the Monopoly Hotels FB page: apparently, starting today (December 13th), through to Christmas Eve (December 24th, not that you needed that clarified!), there's going to be a holiday surprise for each day.

Yesterday, there was a small upgrade that fixed the aspect ratios for iPhone 5 users, so that the game uses all the available visible space on those devices. I'm still on an old iPhone 3GS, so there was absolutely no change for me.

I am also hearing that users in the USA have a couple of new ads they can watch to earn gold (one from Toyota, one some new version of Monopoly: Monopoly Zapped, I think).

Here in Canada, under the Free Gold offers, there is an ad for the Sims Christmas Update that gives you 2 free gold once you watch it to the end.

So far, so good.

EA have not yet fixed the bugs, though - if you check out their FB page, you see not only the people who've reported losing rooms earlier coming back to check and complain that they still haven't heard back or received any sort of compensation, but also several new people - some of whom updated the app just yesterday and promptly lost all their rooms.

Scary stuff.

As a software engineer myself, I do understand that it's terribly hard to fix a bug when you do not have a specific set of steps you can do to reproduce it. However, from the marketing and support point of view, I feel EA is really losing a lot of goodwill from the players by not being really on top of responding to complaints, investigating those complaints, and trying their best to make things right for users who have lost game progress or rooms or whatever.

Yes, you're right, I have heard no response from them to the FB page message(s) I've sent them. I did also send a trouble ticket to EA Help, but all I got from there was the canned advice to log out of origin and log back in, then to delete the game and re-install and hopefully that will fix things. Er - NO. I'd done all that BEFORE I started messaging EA. Sigh.

I have to say, whoever is in charge of EA's support department is doing an abysmal job.

But I digress.

We are to have updates every day for the next 12 days.

What those updates and goodies will be is currently anybody's guess.

Hopefully, after a couple of days, we'll start to see a pattern and maybe we will be able to plan our purchases carefully! :)

I'm excited - would love to see especially some of the high-end rooms come down a bit in price, even for a single day. And yes, I'm still miffed at having lost the opportunity to pick up some Snowflake rooms at M$19,000,000! :)

Any guesses as to what we will see for these 12 days of updates?

I'm hoping for freebies or el-cheapo sales every day.

What do you think???