Office desirability low everywhere, and parks & plazas are making it worse?

[TwelveFloorsUp 1]

I have a city with about 300,000 people, and cannot for the life of me get high wealth office to survive. I have extremely high demand for it, but extremely low desirability all over the city.

 

Inexplicably, building parks and plazas seems to make it WORSE rather than better. They simply lower the desirability even more. The WORST thing is rewards. Any reward will absolutely destroy the CO$$$ desirability for tiles all around. When I noticed that, I moved all my reward buildings out of the city center, which did buy me a decade or two of green desirability. But it didn't take long before everything reverted back down to dull red. Clearly something is wrong.

 

I have adequate police, fire, and education, and low pollution. I have an airport (although it has no customers for some reason, possibly related). I have a huge subway network using one of the older versions of road-top-mass-transit.

 

I'm at a loss. Has anyone else experienced this? Perhaps inverting the desirability effects of rewards & parks is a known issue with a mod somewhere? Or is there a mod to override it? 

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Sounds like the typical effect of a faulty lot with radical stat boosts, i.e. a cheat lot. Are you aware of any such lots? A typical case would be a person downloading an "air purifier" with really high stats and large (up to city-wide) radius (read: cheat lot against air pollution) and then wondering why the entire pollution map turns deep red suddenly at some point in time. Your case may be similar, just with something that boosts park/landmark effect. The biggest problem is that the upload may not have been openly advertised as such.

 

The underlying problem seems to be that at some time, a large plus number can "tip over" and turn negative. This will never ever happen using lots that have halfways moderate stats, but it can happen when you use cheat lots with ridiculously high stats. So in order to be safe in future, you'd have to isolate the faulty plugin. Do you have any clues or ideas? Anything particular you did before it went downhill? Any suspicious lot?

[Prophet42 1,503]

As T Wrecks states, it sounds like you have an overflow problem.  All the underlying stats that you see are based on hex numbers.  Since the hex numbers used in the game cannot be expressed as a negative number, the only way to express a negative number is to express it as a large hex number (such as 0xFFFFFFFF).  If you have some stat that keeps getting larger and larger, eventually you reach the point of no return and the number becomes expressed as a negative value.  Once that happens there is no return until you get rid of the object that is causing the large overflow number.

[TwelveFloorsUp 1]

OK. This is a big help. I do have a lot of downloaded lots, although none that I'm aware of that would do this. I guess I'll have to remove them one by one to try and isolate the problem child.

 

If I figure it out I'll post the culprit here.

 

Thanks/

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Well, typically regular RCI lots (residential, commercial, industrial) are highly unlikely to cause the problem. The same applies to transportation lots. If you don't have any clue, I'd start the search among parks and landmarks because these are most likely to have high landmark/park effects - obviously.

 

Since the problem affects commercial primarily, I'd guess it's a landmark effect rather than a park effect (park effect mainly affects residential). You could compare the desirability map for CO$$$ to the desirability map for R$$$ to gain some insight on this aspect.

 

Among the candidates, I'd say that items made by well-known authors such as Paeng, the NYBT members, the BSP/mipro members, and all "LEX-certified" items from SC4Devotion are least likely to be problematic. If I were you, Id start my search among lots that have been downloaded from less well-known sites, that are older, that haven't been made by established authors, and that may claim large boosts of any kind.

 

This is one of the many situations where a well organised plugins folder will come in handy.