Monopoly City Streets relaunches – still plagued with problems

After a successful launch in terms of player interest but unsuccessful in terms of technical issues, Monopoly City Streets was taken offline for a number of hours before being relaunched. All streets became available again and player accounts were reset and deleted. Unfortunately, despite a number of rule changes designed to help the gameplay mechanics, Monopoly City Streets is still plagued with problems galore.

Monopoly City Streets, a free online version of the popular, decades-old board game, launched on Sept. 9 and the nightmare logistics of hosting such a game on the Internet immediately became apparent. An influx of players, all searching for their own streets, as well as the big name streets such as Wall Street (New York) and Oxford Street (London) and trying to register for accounts simultaneously brought down the servers.

These issues were soon countered with extra servers laid on to at least make the game accessible and playable. However, bigger and more permanent problems soon came to light, most of which were referred to in comments on the Monopoly City Streets blog.

The most obvious problem was one of cheating, the bane of any online game. Hundreds of players were sat at the top of the player leagues with sums of money it should have been impossible to attain in such a short period of time. Other problems included accounts being taken over, all the best streets being bought up within days, and Chance cards being far too numerous and often.

In their wisdom, the people running the game, Hasbro’s U.K. agency Tribal DDB, decided to reset the game to solve the known issues and put everyone back on a level playing field. The game relaunched at around 7 a.m. on Sept. 18. The servers held up this time but the other issues are still all present and the changes to gameplay have created new problems.

In particular, the introduction of taxes on streets and properties is causing consternation because while it isn’t stopping the cheating as intended it is making people wary of buying smaller streets.

Monopoly City Streets has the capacity to be a truly amazing online game which would provide players with entertainment while providing free publicity for the board game. But at the moment the game is too bug-ridden and cheat-friendly to be highly recommended. And the only publicity being generated is negative.

Maybe it’s unfair to criticize a free online game too heavily because it’s free after all. But there should have at least been a period of beta testing to iron out the most obvious bugs and issues inherent in the game which even a reset hasn’t managed to remove. I now suspect that anyone playing between now and when the current game ends on Jan. 1, 2010 are doing an extended beta test ahead of a paid version of the game launching next year.

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