Yup. This is why I forced myself to delete the broadly-similar Magic Kingdoms app yesterday.
I’m in a mood right now where I’m analyzing the games I’m playing for actual value. Grinding in an RPG-type game can be of some value at least as the basic activity (thinking through tactical combat decisions) is enjoyable to me. However, a lot of the Farmville-descendants don’t really have that.
I lament how many so-called “builder” games have a weaker model than the original SimCity. There’s was a great book on SimCity that explained a lot of the math behind it. (It may have been SimCity 2000-specifically) Some neat stuff, and tweaked to be pleasing to the player and provide some challenge.
One of my minuses to ‘builders’ is realizing there’s no real meat to the simulation: It doesn’t care if you put a sewage plant next to a daycare center, for example. Or even provide road access in many cases…
There’s also this, which was a game that was even more shamefaced about it’s attempts to shake customers down for cash.
In the genre, I played:
Simpsons Tapped Out, which seems almost quaintly non-evil.
Star Trek: Which at least had a couple mini-games that were kind of engaging. An interesting “Build an Away Team and send them through a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” where the crew’s skills matter, and a kinda silly “starship combat” that was mainly decided by setup and pressing buttons whenever the cool-down.
Disney’s Magic Kingdoms: Which was heavily marketing-influenced.
Probably a couple I’ve forgotten.
I should go back to Kingdom of Loathing. They’re still around, and feel bad about being too blatant with cash-grabs, at least.
Wow, I’m like $30 into World of Tanks and my daughter about $10 into it. That’s over two years of play, how you get to 15k or more in cash is mind boggling.
Time to check out on Tapped Out. Some of the lack of time/energy to keep playing is due to what’s been going on at work, but I’m only playing about once a month right now. So what I’m seeing when I start the game back up is a message that a quest is over and I can do one last round to wrap up, and since I’m only putting 20 minutes into the game just to clear it out the old tasks, the next quest barely gets started before I put the tablet away again for another couple of weeks.
Following Balance’s advice of analyzing the value of the game, here’s what I came up with:
I don’t have a high-powered tablet, so when I’m harvesting the money crop (money from buildings grouped together), the game slows to a crawl for at least a minute. Many of those buildings have a 3-minute timer, so just about the time I get one section collected, it’s time to go back to the first section. Result: when the game slogs like this, it’s not very enjoyable. It takes about 10 minutes of doing this to get everything collected and speed the game back up.
A related note is there was a storyline where the Krustyland got blown up or something and you had to start over. The problem is that instead of keeping it in a separate area that loaded separately like it was before, you were supposed to put the Krustyland items in the same playfield as the main game. Result: even more to slow down the processing time. I noped right out of that and gave up on having anything to do with Krustyland.
Old items not tied into a quest are removed every so often. Even if you were interested in them, they’re taken away from you.
Some quests reached a point where there didn’t appear to be a way to continue with them.
The game is designed to require two things from you: either you play every 4 hours to have any sort of chance to complete the quests or you pay to win with your credit card. The common tasks are organized so you get the most money and XP overall from the tasks that take the shortest time to complete. Example: completing eight 60-minute tasks will earn more than one 8-hour task.
I decided at the beginning I wasn’t going to spend money to buy doughnuts that let you complete tasks faster and I no longer have the time, energy or interest to play this game every four hours. I probably won’t uninstall it and will check in from time to time just to see what they come up with. There’s been storylines in the game tied into events in the TV series.
But at this point, I’m at the “let’s just be friends” and “I’d like to see other people” stage.
Yeah I just purged some games that had marginally more actual ‘play’ value from my life as part of an overwhelming “I need to be more productive” mindset.
I was playing a fun-ish Toy Story Drop game that was basically a ‘Match 3’ and realized it was basically random chance to progress or not at this point as levels were either trivial due to getting a super bonus or impossible to slowly grind away.
I think it’s time. There’s something causing the entire system to slow down so I’m considering doing a factory reset on the tablet and I really don’t have any reason to reinstall Tapped Out if I do that.
I think it had been two months since I last played it and the mandatory update today caused the game to crash, so that made it easier to uninstall it. I don’t think I’ll miss it.
(I deleted a thread I posted in which I complained about some recent ugly Kingdom of Loathing staff news. It was way off-topic and kind of hijacked the thread. PM me if you want details. Sorry.)