Bye Bye

I just want to personal say Good Bye to all you guys on the community. This was an awesome time playing that game, even if the Hasbro-Tribal-Complex made such a horrible disaster out of it, but i think we still had our personal fun in, and around the game. Sadly technical difficulties stopped my scan of the world, but i think that we tried was good enough ;).

So people, i hope you all find something interesting where to go next. Please comment here anything you would suggest other to test online. It must be free and it must be “in the browser” (so no external application that is started over the browser).

So…. the last one switch off the light

The friend of a cheater (or you ba**ar**!)

Hello People,

actually we found out why so many “innocent” accounts are getting jailed. The Hasbro-Tribal-Complex is thinking that someone who uses the friendlist just does that for …. yes having friends…. 😉 So actually everybody, who had a known cheater in his friendlist, even if he is a good guy and just wanted to “inspect” the cheaters, was banned. We have several reports of people, where family/friends, who arent able to cheat at all, were jailed, because they had some cheating account in the friendlist.

Seriously…. Fail…..

Getting closer Hasbro/Tribal… but not quite there

Hi all,

So this latest maintenance Hasbro/Tribal has done a pretty good job cleaning things up.

Lots of previously stuck streets… either in offers, or unplayed accounts, are now back on the market. Other little bugs appear fixed.

We’ve seen many jailed accounts, and at least one of the biggest exploits we know about has been fixed. If you’ve seen duplicated streets or had your street stolen, then you know what it is 😉

Personally, I’ve seen every last one of my accounts jailed, and many others associated with “bestcheater” have seen the same.

Of course they haven’t fixed everything. There are still accounts in the global leaderboard that I believe have been cheating along with the rest of us, but they’ve certainly stopped a lot it.

There are still many exploits to enjoy, so we haven’t given up. Lets see how long before someone from this blog can get back on the global leaderboard.

Keep having fun all.

Cheers,

monopolib

View from the top…

Hooray, I have finally claimed the #1 spot on the global leader board.

manapalib is #1

manapalib will hold the #1 spot for as long as I am able (I’m guessing until MCS jails the account).

Of course that account has taken advantage of several exploits to reach the top… I encourage MCS to fix those bugs and get this game to stable, mostly bug-free state.  I’m not holding my breath.

However, being #1 on the global leader board isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be. The number of bulldozers and hazards coming my way is incredible. Here’s a graph of the damage done:

View from the top: Nothing but Sabotage

I intend to publish my saboteurs… you’re welcome to help me fight them off  😉

And as some motivation, I’ll pre-announce the monopolib sweepstakes that I will be starting later today or tomorrow.

The conditions of the sweepstakes are:

1. manapalib maintains #1 on the global leader board
2. any competition on the global leader board is still a reasonably significant amount behind
3. manapalib collects rent

Given those 3 conditions hold, manapalib will give away its daily rent (usually somewhere between $10 – 20 billion). I will do this everyday.

Do not simply reply to this blog post to enter. Details on how to enter the sweepstakes will be posted soon.

Enjoy,

monopolib

How many streets should I have?

While we all know the best way to increase your rent is by building up your streets, many of us are filling our streets to the brim.

As it becomes harder and harder to find long streets and you’ve completely filled your streets with houses, we’re faced with the question of whether we should build up a new street or not. Here I set out to help you answer that question.

When the tax-rule was first announced, I crunched the numbers to determine the optimal number of streets to own, with the assumption each street you own earns the same amount of rent, and your streets are as full as they can be with houses.

The answer, 19.

See this spreadsheet for details, or read more below.

How many streets should I have?

Now this magic number of 19 is helpful, but more often than not the question is just, “Given the 5 streets I have now, should I get a 6th?”

The simplest way to answer that question is the following:

1. Take the current total amount of rent you’re earning and multiply by 0.03. This gives you the amount of additional tax a new street would incur.
2. If you can get a new street that earns more than that value, then go for it.
3. If you cannot, then don’t.
4. Also, if you notice that the number calculated above is greater than the amount of rent you earn from any one of your streets, you’d be better off selling off that street.

Remember, if you still have space to build on your first 5 streets, you should just keep doing that. Don’t worry about going past 5 streets until you’ve filled those up.

Hope that helps!

Street Giveaway Competition #1 Results

And the winner is… jackoltd.

It is nice to see he has already started to fill the street up.

(I was in two minds whether or not to post the winner’s name – as undoubtably this will bring him unwanted attention – ie hazards – but oh well, have to take the good with the bad :P)

Congratualtions to him. If you entered and were unlucky then fear not – another street giveaway competition will be coming soon.

Best

Global Leader Board… for everyone!

It has always annoyed me that Monopoly City Streets only offers a global leader board showing the top-10 scoring players.  What about the rest of us?  Everyone wants to know how well they’re doing… where they stand on the global leader board.

Now you can, with my global leader board: monopolib.appspot.com

monopolib.appspot.com

This tool is still in BETA, and there’s a number of improvements I intend to make, but for now, enjoy finally knowing how you compare to the rest of the MCS player-base.

Cheers!

monopolib

I need money – the request for a ridicioulus idea

Hiho people,

I was a bit bored and thought, hey, why not buy all free streets or lets say.. as much as possible of it. So far the account has 1300< streets, but the money spended by friends is going low, so…. if you want to spend some money in this ridicioulus idea, just make ridicioulus high offers for a street of the account mcsscan and then we use this money to buy more streets. The account doesnt do anything more (what he can do with 100% taxes LOL)… 🙂

mcsscan profile 19.10.2009

EDIT: The mcsscan bot who controls the account now auto accepts offers that have more money in it, then the value of the street. So you can always spend directly money and dont have to wait for hand work ;).

So, Happy Building! 🙂

Monopoly Autobot V7.6

EDIT (by bestcheater): If you haven’t already entered the Street Giveaway Competition below then do so! Competition will end quite soon.

Now available, Autobot Version 7.6

7.6 EXE ZIP
2F9BD0748E014D67D3C26076BBD1DDBE
7.6 EXE
FBC3B31B1EA07977B59CDA79D0F8821B

New Features 7.6: Street scanner now pimps out async io like it should . It gets 32 or so completed queries a second now. Its a lot faster. It can go even faster, but now the server gets mad at me and shuts me down and I have “forcibly closed down by the host” errors. If you get that, you need to make it go slower. This version doesn’t make it go slower as a config for the user yet. Look for 7.6.1 in the near future.

New Features 7.5: Street Scanner now uses asynch io. Its supposed to be better than the approach I used. it doesn’t seem much faster for me tho. Let me know how it goes. Also, the parse thing now takes google map coordinates as well as wireshark copies. So you can use googlemaps and get the coords for your box.

Bug fixed: that stadium in the build bot is fixed, I think.

Not bug fixed: still can’t get logged in as or select opponents with spaces in names even with all the easy to implement suggestions I’ve been given. 😦

7.0 Notes

In street searcher, you can now search on a particular username to find roads in the list that are owned by a particular person. Pretty handy for recovering from a BANNING…. it puts the streets it finds in the MARK list. I’ve had to write them down manually, but its a small price to pay for getting back those sweet streets.

Note: I have had some threading trouble with the damn thread unsafe data grid control so if it crashes when you click the grid when the scanner is running, know that I am aware of the issue and have thought ALOT about different approaches to solving it, and haven’t come up with a good solution yet. If one of you geniuses out there knows what I can do to to prevent this race condition, please ridicule me in public, then help out a noob (me)! Also note the code in this version is not my best idea at this point. I thought of a better way of managing the individual thread street lists (each have its own list instead of locking on a single list) which might improve performance. I haven’t written that yet and its Friday and I wanted this out there for the weekend.

Also, improvements to build bot include the addition of “pause” functionality for getting dozers, bonus cards, and hazards. Just type the word “pause” in the combobox associated with the event you want to pause on, and the bot will pause and let you manually deal with either through the buttons on the bottom of the buildbot form or in the browser. I also added exception handling to those bottom buttons so a bad response from the server wont cause unhanded exception errors.

There’s probably more in there, but I forget now.

Happy BOT’ing.

Oh and my comment on HASBRO’s OPEN LETTER
Seriously Hasbro, I could understand the NOOBISHNESS of this game if you weren’t a major game publisher. But you are a big company with big, well respected brands who’s histories stretch back almost a century. You shouldn’t risk public goodwill on half baked promo’s like this. And furthermore, the main problems with this game wouldn’t have required much more attention to detail or money to prevent. But your apology is accepted, provisionally. Please continue to improve the game, fix bugs, and address the issues that remain. Of particular problem now is the lack of decent streets to buy. Banned accounts have hundreds (individually) and thousands (collectively) of the best streets in the world locked up, and the 1-week auto-accept of offers seems broken, as well as the two-week auto sell back. These need to implemented and/or fixed ASAP.

-1stPl4ce
Winner of The First Monopoly City Streets Online Marketing Experiment. 😉

Street Giveaway Competition #1 CLOSED

Competition now closed. Winner has been contacted and will be announced here soon.

Saying as it now seems that the world is basically sold-out, we here at Bestcheater want to help you guys out getting your hands on decent streets. We still have a large portfolio of rather tasty streets and are going to give a few of them away to you guys.

We are going to start off by giving away a (rather modest) 56mill street.

For a chance of getting your hands on this street just leave a comment below,  remembering to include your ingame name and we will pick a winner at random.

P.S. In the future we might give away some of our sts worth 100mill+ so stay tuned!
PPS All of our streets were genuinely bought near the start of the game – none have been stolen – so win in good conscience.

PPPS (by 1stPl4ce): You can confirm this all this now for yourself now with my latest autobot, version7, which includes a multi-threaded street scanner.