Totally bizarre "new" rooms! Golden Cauldron and Golden Goose now pay less!

I really hadn't thought that EA could sink much lower in their manipulation of the Monopoly Hotels game.

But, once again, I'm proven wrong.

Here we have another update. A Friday update instead of a Thursday update.

And the first two rooms I see in the Guest Rooms list?

Our old friends, the Golden Goose and the Golden Cauldron.

But what's this? 

Are these really the same rooms?

They both say "New Item". (HAH!)

And BOTH pay out less than half of what they used to.

Here's what the Golden Goose looked like when it originally debuted:

And here's what the Golden Cauldron originally looked like:

Here, just for comparison, are today's "NEW ITEM" gold-producing rooms:

Yes, we've had these rooms change their price before.

But for EA to "introduce" the exact same rooms with new, MUCH lower payouts? That's a really low blow.

I already had 7 of the Golden Cauldron, as you can see below.

5 Golden Cauldrons in Pennsylvania: 

   

And two more in Mediterranean:

All seven have been paying out 10 gold each at 7-hour intervals, making me relatively pleased.

So I was silly and jumped the gun, buying an eighth Golden Cauldron at the new price just now:

     

I don't have a good feeling about this, I can tell you.

Right now, as you can see, my existing Golden Cauldron is still on the old schedule.

I want to see what happens when the new one starts producing. 

I've got my fingers crossed. The time-to-build is now MUCH longer than it used to be, as well, so I suspect it will be *next* weekend before I get my first payout on the new room. 

At that point, it's anyone's guess as to whether my old Golden Cauldrons will pay the old amount at the old frequency or will all magically update to the new ...

Of course, my gut instinct says to just swallow the loss of 1,500 gold and delete the new room before it can have an impact ...

I'm going to wait. 

Will YOU wait? Will you buy these "new" gold producing rooms if you already have them in their old incarnations?

Update (an hour later ...)

Okay, I wimped out.

Knowing how ruthless EA has been recently, I decided to cut my losses and discard that brand new Golden Cauldron. In its place, I now have a Piano and another Chef's Hat being built in Pennsylvania ... at least I will have some good XP being collected even if I just wasted my gold.

Let's hope I continue to collect the old payouts from my existing Golden Cauldrons. I'd rather wait and see whether someone else is able to make the two types of Golden Cauldrons co-exist peacefully side by side!

Delayed update this week? Or no update at all?

It's almost half past seven in the evening now, on a Thursday, too, which is EA's usual day to release an update to the Monopoly Hotels game.

As yet, no update.

My Guest Rooms list still has the Fishing Pole and the Chef's Hat listed as "New Item". Nothing new in the sticker book, Decorations or Attractions, either.

And no new rooms in the Museum, Aquarium or Zoo.

I guess that covers all the bases? Oh, wait. 

Nope.

No sale on anything, either.

No new trains or any other way to earn gold.

Hmm.

Maybe EA is no longer updating the game? Maybe this was the grand finale?

Naaaaah.

I'm cynical enough to believe there will be weekly updates for a good long time yet, at least another 12 months. There's got to be some kind of "get profitable or else" deadline, but that is presumably a bit longer than the less-than-one-year that this game has existed.

So, either EA have finally learned from their mistakes and have decided to take a little extra time to really run the latest release through some quality assurance testing, or else they are just running late and will do an update tomorrow. After all, it's not unheard of for them to do a Friday update.

Oh, well.

I'll just go glare at the Fishing Pole and Chef's Hat that are taking up space in my hotels ...

Typical Bait and Switch tactics - Fishing Pole Room and Chef's Hat Room now pay M$

Remember these rooms? That just a few hours ago promised to pay out in huge, lovely pots of gold?

Remember how you felt absolutely sure EA was going to switch the payouts AFTER people have purchased the rooms?

Right.

You were absolutely correct.

Despite strong suspicions that these rooms would be corrected to pay out M$, I still bought one of each. Now I am just glad that I didn't pay extra gold to have them finish early! 

So there you have it folks - more bait-n-switch tactics from our friends at EA.

You may be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt ... maybe it was a typo. 

If that's the case, though, they really need to fire their entire QA team and hire someone who can actually pay attention for about 10 seconds before they make each release. 

For crying out loud, it really isn't that hard to make sure room payouts are correct before you launch a room into the wild, is it?

Or maybe I am not being cynical enough. Maybe it was the marketing team trying to entice players to purchase gold (remember, it's now "on sale"???) to buy a few of these rooms? Or is that me being too cynical?

The rooms as they stand now are no longer something you should purchase - it seems like a lot of your hard-earned gold to pay, just to get yet another M$-producing room - and that, too, rooms whose payouts in M$ aren't at all eye-popping! 

Save up and pay the 450 gold for a Harvest Pumpkin instead ... it pays less XP, but you at least get a whopping M$24,000,000 every 36 hours!

The only saving grace is that the Chef's Hat room still pays a nice XP yield every 18 hours, so I think I'll keep the one I purchased, but I certainly won't be buying any more of either of these rooms!

Do you believe the rooms we've already purchased will pay out in gold? No? Me, neither!

I would not be at all surprised if EA loses a few players after this exciting move. But then, as I've mentioned before, this is an addictive game, and these weekly stupidities seem to be as much part of the pulse of the game as anything else ...

A fabulous update: 2 new gold producing rooms: Fishing Pole Room and Chef's Hat Room

Please disregard the details in this post. These rooms are NOT REALLY! gold-producing rooms, since EA has made the "correction" to the payouts - all yields are now M$, not XP.

Yes, indeed, folks! 

We have two new gold-producing rooms.

Not just gold-producing, but MASSIVELY productive rooms.

The Fishing Pole Room is the cheaper of the two, at 400 gold to purchase. It's yield is correspondingly lower: 3,354,167 gold and 120,000XP every 23 hours, in a 3-square room. Which works out to 48,611.12 gold and 1,739.13XP per square, per hour. 

The second room is the Chef's Hat room, which will set you back a mere 550 gold to purchase. This one occupies just two squares and pays out even MORE gold: 2,400,000 gold and 599,528XP every 18 hours, for an average of 66,666.67 gold and 16,653.56XP per square, per hour.

Either way, you can't lose. Both these rooms pay out like gang-busters. (Is that the correct phrase? Dunno.)

Pick up one or more of these ASAP, is my advice. Seeing how EA has been making gold harder and harder to get recently, I'd suspect that either these payouts are incorrect (and will be corrected soon), or, even more likely, these rooms will also become "Limited Time" really soon and will then disappear.

Oh, and there is another sale on:

This, of course, refers to the gold packs you can buy if you wish to advance in the game faster.

My advice? If you really do want to spend your hard-earned cash on this game, this may be a good time to do it: grab enough gold to pick up at least one of the new rooms if you don't already have enough saved up!

Update, a few hours after the release: The rooms no longer pay out gold, only M$. So save your money, please don't spend real cash to purchase these rooms! Read all about it here.

Update Part 4: New Dark Blue Properties Sticker

Yay! A new sticker, and one that pays out gold ... 

Collect both the dark blue properties and you'll earn yourself a nice little 100-gold bonus.

If you're like me, you've already picked up Boardwalk when it debuted at M$5,000,000 ... as expected, it has now sky-rocketed to M$500,000,000, making it very, very hard to purchase unless you really stocked up on high-producing rooms like Mayan Calendar or Big Ben or Giant Snowflake or Winter Scarf ...

         

 There you go. An easy 100 gold!

Update Part 3: 30% off rooms you buy with gold

Well ... here's the carrot, the temptation for this week.

All rooms you buy with gold are 30% off. 

Wait. 

Not all rooms you buy with gold. Only the M$-producing ones. 

The gold-producing rooms, as I mentioned in my other post, are not only NOT on sale, they are all now "Limited Time"!

I notice that the Giant Snowflake and the Ice Skates, previously marked "Limited Time", are now apparently going to stick around. Big whoop.

The Attractions you buy with gold are also 30% off, but not the Decorations.

Will you buy any of those gold rooms with your hard-earned gold? 

I'd suggest, instead, that you spend your gold on gold-producing rooms, even at full-price, because obviously EA isn't going to let such gold bonanzas stick around too long.

Oops. Looks like I mis-spoke. It's not ALL rooms you buy with gold. Only all million-plus-producing rooms you buy with gold. As you can see, there are MANY rooms that have NOT gone on sale: 

    

Oh, well. Whatever. 

I shall rephrase my grand announcement.

SOME rooms you buy with gold are 30% off this week! :)

Update, part 2: New Epee Room and Ballet Shoes Room

Here's the more "normal" (or should I say "routine") part of today's update: we have two new rooms.

You can see from the blurb at the top of this picture that these are the "Ballet Dancer" and "Fencer" rooms ... again, as is recent practice, both these rooms cost gold to buy. LOTS of gold: 1015 for the Epee room and 750 gold for the Ballet Shoes. 

Those numbers may not seem outrageous today, when you still have gold-producing rooms and trains, but I can bet that players who are new to the game and haven't much gold yet will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to buy those rooms unless they shell out actual money ... remember that the trains are no longer available for purchase, and gold-producing rooms are going to disappear within a week or two at most!

Enjoy the new rooms ... they do have good payouts, M$56,000,000 for the Epee room every 42 hours and M$16,125,000 every 43 hours from the Ballet Shoes room.

Today's Update: All Gold-Producing rooms now Limited Time!

I had the sinking suspicion that this was coming ... and here it is.

EA has recently moved back to stingy-gold attitude, taking away the trains you could buy, hiking the price on the gold-producing rooms, severely reducing the number of community chest cards that give gold ...

And here we have the final blow: all gold-producing rooms are now Limited Time only.

Which means, buy them this week or weep. 

No guarantees that they will stay around for the entire week, of course - sometimes we have updates as early as Monday of the week following an update.

So ... I would buy whatever gold-producing rooms you can afford ASAP.

It truly does not help that today's update has 30% off rooms you buy with gold - but that doesn't apply to the gold producing rooms, which are still full price.

Wail. Weep. Deal with it. I guess we have no options.

I'm not sure where EA is going with this - from "liking" the game to "unliking" it is a pretty small step ... and boredom is right around the corner - who's got the time to sit around collecting gold in dribs and drabs to buy hugely expensive rooms?

While we wait ... Cricket Bat room and Soccer Ball Room

Today is Thursday, which means there is most probably an update in the offing.

Which reminds me that I haven't mentioned last week's updates, or perhaps that should be categorized as the New Year updates.

There wasn't much to crow about with that one ... the Mayan Calendar room and the holiday decorations all disappeared, the Hourglass room and the Ice Skates room both got marked Limited Time. The Winter Scarf and Giant Snowflake rooms (and all the other gold rooms) went back to full price.

An unexpected change was that the Big Ben attraction now pays out 10 times what it used to - now paying the same as the short-lived Mayan Calendar. But it's not as great a bargain: it costs the same as Mayan Calendar, but takes up 8 squares instead of 4 effectively cutting it's per-square yield in half compared to the Mayan Calendar. Still, if you're short on M$-producing rooms, it'd be smart to grab this attraction.

And of course, we got two new rooms: the Cricket Bat room and the Soccer Ball room.

That was it.

And now I will continue to wait to see what today's update brings ...