I love Monopoly. It’s one of those childhood games that taught me the nuances of collective bargaining and why you should never buy utilities or train stations!

Forgoing the initial furor of site lag, bugs, cheating and flawed gameplay, the lads at Tribal DDB London have decided to reset the game and fix the flaws!

Bravo!

Personally, i see this as a fantastic opportunity for Hasbro to connect and engage with its fans. From a reported 1.7 million players, not only is this a massive multiplayer online game, but more importantly, there exists an opportunity to create a online brand community that will last when the game finishes in Jan 10.

In many regards, despite having 1.7 million people playing the game, it feels like there are 1.7 million individual players rather than a community.

So what features should the lads embed?

• Chat forum and instant messaging - give people the opportunity to interact with the community
• Encourage trading and inter player activity - provide bonuses for successful trades. Give people additional incentive to interact with others
• Promote Activity - rather than a 24 hour rental period, pay rent say every 12 hours. Also, chance cards should be rewarded on the level of activity
• Indicate players who are online
• Live help/guide - The online version does not share the same rules as the boardgame. Give people a guide to understand how to play the game and provide a user submitted Q&A section. I initially came in thinking if i buy 3 adjacent streets, i’ll be able to improve my rental values and build hotels. Now i’m stuck with 3 streets that mean diddly squat!
• Go tribal - It can be a race of city values - Sydney vs New York, Paris vs Istanbul. Forums can be set for cities to congregate, strategise and plot the downfall of their competitors

How can they provide better gameplay?

• Improve the zooming function - provide a guide of where the players are zooming. I was looking at outer burbs in Sydney and somehow, zooming took me to Ulladulla
• Improve gameplay speed - I don’t agree with the game promoting you to buy local, but being the case, improve the browsing speed of surfing my local streets compared to buying Uber Strasse in Leipzig
• Improve the tax scale - How can you take over the world when after 35 streets, the tax rate is @ 100%?

What would you recommend?

Find me! My monopoly user name is: Woahjeebus (and yes, that’s the only account i have ;)