Spoilt
2010-02-07
This was going to be a piece for the news/features site I've been considering trying to write for, but in the meantime it probably works better here. This place needs more posts anyway.
Depending on how deep you want to read, this post is either food for thought on the difficulty of games and the dangers of listening to the vocal minority, or it's a rambling tale about why I'm not playing Metaplace Inc's Facebook game, Island Life.
(What you didn't spot there was that when I went off to check that the URL I was going to use worked, I was compelled to tell my little guy to pick some raspberries).
I must admit, I hadn't previously looked at any Facebook games. In fact the phrase 'avoid them like the plague' springs to mind. I am/was playing Island Life to spy on Metaplace Inc. (besides respect for Raph, it turns out that Cuppycake is good to read too), to see what they do next.
In terms of the gameplay, it's probably much the same as most of its siblings: you set up some stuff, you go away and live your life for a while, you come back to reap the rewards and set up some more stuff. People who know me may have heard me refer to such games as Travian-like* for brevity: I really love the whole part-time player aspect (and still intend to design a game like that, when I get around to it).
* Travian isn't an early example of such a game, I'm sure, although it is quite well done. Island Life differs from it in many ways, most importantly that my island isn't constantly under threat of someone coming and burning it down with fire catapults.
Island Life is very pretty and generally very polished. (I say 'generally', because it's in beta, and it isn't perfect. We'll get to that.) It also has really nice social features, as you'd expect from the people who brought you Metaplace. It's probably the same engine (you never can tell), it's still a flash client so they probably rescued quite a lot of that code, and a lot of the assets have been salvaged straight out of the previous project: given the quality of those things it's good to see that they're not going to waste.
The balancing is a little odd. You unlock lots of new plants to grow as you gain levels, but I found that the crops I started with were optimal for almost any purpose until about level 7, and even then the level 1 crop remained best for half of my possible scenarios. (Don't worry, I'm not going to do a guide to it. I'd enjoy doing a proper breakdown of the maths, but that wouldn't be of interest to most of its market and might even ruin it for them [in fact ruining games like that is kind of the point of this post]. There's a sense in which I would love to have been the balancer on that project, but let's not go there.)
Anyway, so it's good. It's kind of addictive in the way that even repetitive tasks can be if the reward mechanics are right. I don't know to what extent Mr. Koster is personally involved with the design, but I've said before that his book taught me a lot about such things, so it's not a surprise that the Metaplace folk continue to do it well.
It being a beta (an actual technical beta, by the looks**) there are some technical issues. The other day one of them killed my island: reset it to the starting state. My 'character' (consisting mainly of my level, as far as I can tell) remained intact.
** I keep meaning to post about real betas and marketing ones (and how much I hate the latter). I seem to remember having mentioned that once or twice before, so I better got on and do it. Worth mentioning that it is already possible to pay real money for Island Life stuff: that stretches my definition of a beta quite a lot, but they've got to pay the wages somehow...
I had a look around the discussion board. A while ago Cuppy wrote an article on providing customer support and community management for Facebook games; one of her points was that the users are more vocal, and I was surprised (shocked, perhaps) by just how much. Without the typical internet anonymity these people are still raging at least as potently as players on any game forums I've seen (and I've seen some pretty heated ones, up close, trust me).
Anyway, back to topic. I found Raph apologising and saying that players affected would be compensated according to their level, and that real money would be refunded. Sounds good to me; it's beta: stuff goes wrong and anything they do to make amends is commendable.
No, sorry, that may just be me. In actual fact the vocal Facebook response was 'Ra ra ra! This compensation is nothing compared to the number of lighthouses I've lost! Ra ra ra! /ragequit'. Which is a common player response to everything, of course. So anyway, the post said that people affected would receive the compensation next time they logged in. I logged in, and had around 45,000 coins. Before I found that there would be compensation I was a little annoyed at having lost the 5,000 that I had painstakingly scraped together to upgrade my island. (It's worth mentioning that if I had lots of neighbours I could enlarge the island for a fraction of the price. But I don't have many neighbours, because every time Island Life offered to post anything to my feeds I told it not to. Did I mention I normally avoid Facebook games like the plague).
Faced with that money several times over, I enlarged the island several times over, but doing so wasn't very rewarding. I don't mind the mechanic of doing something over and over in order to be able to do it better, but being able to do so much at once without having earned it just exposed and emphasised it, making it feel a bit hollow.
(It didn't help that I found the enlarge tool unreliable, capable of providing a different number of fertile spaces depending on exactly where you put it. I have several things I ought to report, it being a beta and all, when I get around to it. I'm deterred: the Facebook forum support is so bad that it's practically impossible for me to see which issues might have already been reported, and I'm the kind of person who would rather keep quiet than risk making duplicate reports. I should fight that: I'm sure they'd rather know about something twice (or a dozen times, or a hundred) than not at all.)
Now, I'm not ranting, just making an observation. Some players will be put off by compensation; not just the ones who feel it's too generous because they aren't the ones getting it, but also some who are getting more than they needed. To throw in (and slightly misuse, but never mind) two of the great terms from the relevant literature, they could lose the flow because the difficulty just dropped, or they could be given an unexpected opportunity to grok the game sooner.
Wow, my spellchecker recognises 'grok'! Although apparently spellchecker isn't a word. Ho hum.
I'm not even saying that I was given too much compensation. Well, OK, I am, but only me personally: the people ranting in the forums had spent much more on their island and were under-compensated. While I expect there was probably a slightly better payout function that could have been used (you think wealth should be linear with level? Really? XP isn't linear with level...) I'm quite certain that there wouldn't be a perfect one, for all people. I know that, because it's widely recognised that different people have wildly varying tolerances for difficulty (and ease).
Perhaps this is a cautionary tale. Let's forget for a moment that I'm not really a Facebook games kind of a person, or let's assume there are people quite like me who are. The people ranting in the forums are vocal and in your face, but it's easy to pander to them too much. Ultimately most of them are ranting because they're passionate about the game, and a lot of them are telling you how much they hate it because they love it. They're not about to quit: they're going to keep telling you they will, but the majority of them will still be there next time, threatening to quit over the next thing. Meanwhile people like me will just silently disappear into the night: the presence of the vocal minority has been enough to keep me on the sidelines of the community in every game I ever played.
That isn't news to Metaplace, of course, because I'm sure Raph and Cuppy (not to mention others there) know it far better than me. It's not a revelation to anyone with any CM experience, or many of the industry people who don't, I hope.
Perhaps it's food for thought for other interested souls, and in any case it never hurts to say out loud the things we all know, lest we forget them.
Depending on how deep you want to read, this post is either food for thought on the difficulty of games and the dangers of listening to the vocal minority, or it's a rambling tale about why I'm not playing Metaplace Inc's Facebook game, Island Life.
(What you didn't spot there was that when I went off to check that the URL I was going to use worked, I was compelled to tell my little guy to pick some raspberries).
I must admit, I hadn't previously looked at any Facebook games. In fact the phrase 'avoid them like the plague' springs to mind. I am/was playing Island Life to spy on Metaplace Inc. (besides respect for Raph, it turns out that Cuppycake is good to read too), to see what they do next.
In terms of the gameplay, it's probably much the same as most of its siblings: you set up some stuff, you go away and live your life for a while, you come back to reap the rewards and set up some more stuff. People who know me may have heard me refer to such games as Travian-like* for brevity: I really love the whole part-time player aspect (and still intend to design a game like that, when I get around to it).
* Travian isn't an early example of such a game, I'm sure, although it is quite well done. Island Life differs from it in many ways, most importantly that my island isn't constantly under threat of someone coming and burning it down with fire catapults.
Island Life is very pretty and generally very polished. (I say 'generally', because it's in beta, and it isn't perfect. We'll get to that.) It also has really nice social features, as you'd expect from the people who brought you Metaplace. It's probably the same engine (you never can tell), it's still a flash client so they probably rescued quite a lot of that code, and a lot of the assets have been salvaged straight out of the previous project: given the quality of those things it's good to see that they're not going to waste.
The balancing is a little odd. You unlock lots of new plants to grow as you gain levels, but I found that the crops I started with were optimal for almost any purpose until about level 7, and even then the level 1 crop remained best for half of my possible scenarios. (Don't worry, I'm not going to do a guide to it. I'd enjoy doing a proper breakdown of the maths, but that wouldn't be of interest to most of its market and might even ruin it for them [in fact ruining games like that is kind of the point of this post]. There's a sense in which I would love to have been the balancer on that project, but let's not go there.)
Anyway, so it's good. It's kind of addictive in the way that even repetitive tasks can be if the reward mechanics are right. I don't know to what extent Mr. Koster is personally involved with the design, but I've said before that his book taught me a lot about such things, so it's not a surprise that the Metaplace folk continue to do it well.
It being a beta (an actual technical beta, by the looks**) there are some technical issues. The other day one of them killed my island: reset it to the starting state. My 'character' (consisting mainly of my level, as far as I can tell) remained intact.
** I keep meaning to post about real betas and marketing ones (and how much I hate the latter). I seem to remember having mentioned that once or twice before, so I better got on and do it. Worth mentioning that it is already possible to pay real money for Island Life stuff: that stretches my definition of a beta quite a lot, but they've got to pay the wages somehow...
I had a look around the discussion board. A while ago Cuppy wrote an article on providing customer support and community management for Facebook games; one of her points was that the users are more vocal, and I was surprised (shocked, perhaps) by just how much. Without the typical internet anonymity these people are still raging at least as potently as players on any game forums I've seen (and I've seen some pretty heated ones, up close, trust me).
Anyway, back to topic. I found Raph apologising and saying that players affected would be compensated according to their level, and that real money would be refunded. Sounds good to me; it's beta: stuff goes wrong and anything they do to make amends is commendable.
No, sorry, that may just be me. In actual fact the vocal Facebook response was 'Ra ra ra! This compensation is nothing compared to the number of lighthouses I've lost! Ra ra ra! /ragequit'. Which is a common player response to everything, of course. So anyway, the post said that people affected would receive the compensation next time they logged in. I logged in, and had around 45,000 coins. Before I found that there would be compensation I was a little annoyed at having lost the 5,000 that I had painstakingly scraped together to upgrade my island. (It's worth mentioning that if I had lots of neighbours I could enlarge the island for a fraction of the price. But I don't have many neighbours, because every time Island Life offered to post anything to my feeds I told it not to. Did I mention I normally avoid Facebook games like the plague).
Faced with that money several times over, I enlarged the island several times over, but doing so wasn't very rewarding. I don't mind the mechanic of doing something over and over in order to be able to do it better, but being able to do so much at once without having earned it just exposed and emphasised it, making it feel a bit hollow.
(It didn't help that I found the enlarge tool unreliable, capable of providing a different number of fertile spaces depending on exactly where you put it. I have several things I ought to report, it being a beta and all, when I get around to it. I'm deterred: the Facebook forum support is so bad that it's practically impossible for me to see which issues might have already been reported, and I'm the kind of person who would rather keep quiet than risk making duplicate reports. I should fight that: I'm sure they'd rather know about something twice (or a dozen times, or a hundred) than not at all.)
Now, I'm not ranting, just making an observation. Some players will be put off by compensation; not just the ones who feel it's too generous because they aren't the ones getting it, but also some who are getting more than they needed. To throw in (and slightly misuse, but never mind) two of the great terms from the relevant literature, they could lose the flow because the difficulty just dropped, or they could be given an unexpected opportunity to grok the game sooner.
Wow, my spellchecker recognises 'grok'! Although apparently spellchecker isn't a word. Ho hum.
I'm not even saying that I was given too much compensation. Well, OK, I am, but only me personally: the people ranting in the forums had spent much more on their island and were under-compensated. While I expect there was probably a slightly better payout function that could have been used (you think wealth should be linear with level? Really? XP isn't linear with level...) I'm quite certain that there wouldn't be a perfect one, for all people. I know that, because it's widely recognised that different people have wildly varying tolerances for difficulty (and ease).
Perhaps this is a cautionary tale. Let's forget for a moment that I'm not really a Facebook games kind of a person, or let's assume there are people quite like me who are. The people ranting in the forums are vocal and in your face, but it's easy to pander to them too much. Ultimately most of them are ranting because they're passionate about the game, and a lot of them are telling you how much they hate it because they love it. They're not about to quit: they're going to keep telling you they will, but the majority of them will still be there next time, threatening to quit over the next thing. Meanwhile people like me will just silently disappear into the night: the presence of the vocal minority has been enough to keep me on the sidelines of the community in every game I ever played.
That isn't news to Metaplace, of course, because I'm sure Raph and Cuppy (not to mention others there) know it far better than me. It's not a revelation to anyone with any CM experience, or many of the industry people who don't, I hope.
Perhaps it's food for thought for other interested souls, and in any case it never hurts to say out loud the things we all know, lest we forget them.
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