When I found out that Glitch was going back to beta on twitter I was really really frustrated. I was on the bus coming home from work so to ease my anger I tweeted to the @playglitch twitter handle: "although I respect your choice to unrelease I think you've forgotten about what made glitch so fun in the beta." Not thinking much about it I then opted to request a refund for my subscription I had purchased back in the beta period. The refund was granted a few minutes later and I went on my way.
A few minutes ago the @playglitch twitter handle replied back to my tweet with the question: Well?? What made Glitch so fun in the beta?!?
I opened twitter.app on my iPhone and started to reply but then realized that this was going to be a bit longer then the 160 character limit of one tweet. So I decided to post here, maybe some of you will have your own opinions but the point is that the devs are really looking for ideas as to why glitch is getting just a little bit bland. I have spoken to a few people who I know in real life and they started expressing concern over this about a month ago. So here it is, pretty unedited thoughts as to why I think glitch was way more fun in the beta and what I experienced in these few months as I slowly got bored of glitch.
1. Not being able to play at all times: Although I will admit I was super annoyed durning the beta when the world was closed and all I wanted to do was go play it really created this element of novelty. The day the world would open I would keep checking tweets from the @isglitchopen account so that the minute they tweeted I would login. Once I refreshed the beta.glitch.com page and it said open before the tweet was published and I was super excited. I really am not saying that you should start closing the world periodically; that wouldn't be a very smart move, but I do think that there is some sort of phycological element there that you can explore to make the game more interesting.
2. Reset Reset Level Up Level Up: When the reset happened I immediately felt this need to level up as quickly as possible and re purchase my 50k house. This was a huge mistake, I pretty much spent the whole time mining away on the huge sparkly rock from levels 7-18. I know this was all my choice and I could have left whenever I wanted but I really felt the need to make money, level up before I could have as much fun as I did in beta. In fact this wasn't the case, it just got more and more boring each level I got. In fact I made it to level 23 in the beta in much less time then I spent now making it to level 20.
3. If your not playing your still learning: This is really a part of the game which I am starting to hate. Although its cool and all to be able to learn skills when your not playing, I think there should be cap on how long you can be inactive before you are denied the ability to learn more new skills. There was a few weeks where I was learning 10 skills without ever going to the game due to not having the time. When I did get back it was awesome and I spent the whole time finishing the quests I had for those skills but after a while I pretty much had every still in the game without even have used most of them. I was surprised once when I noticed I didn't need to pet the pigs to get the meat since I learned AK3-5 all while being away. So this comes back to the whole the game is closed so we can't learn skills issue that we had in beta which I think made the pace of the game much more enjoyable.
4. Subscription: When I first started playing glitch I knew I was going to super this great game. I liked the credit system (although im not too much of an avatar guy) and I liked being able to TP. But again going back to learning skills to fast, I already have TP5 in a few weeks so I had absolutely no use for TP tokens. These and credits just kept piling up in my account and I have so many of them I don't think I will never need to buy another credit in my life. The vote part of the subscription was really what I was interested in when I purchased a subscription. I would even pay the 50$ again just to be able to vote. I complained about this in the forum months ago with an assurance that there would be votes soon, but to this date my votes are piling up as well. All this leaves this excess and feeling that this is no reason to play because there is nothing to spend. I really really wished they would have tested the voting system a few times with some issues they had internally and make us feel like we were still in beta making decisions.
5. API: When I found out you guys had an API I was like OMG OMG OMG as I am a coder and I enjoy doing crazy things with open apis. I started making some cool arduino applications with the API and I even got some recognition from the @playglitch twitter account. This was awesome. This made me want to keep playing with the API and making more cool stuff. As soon as you guys opened your dev.glitch.com page I was like OMG OMG OMG this is so awesome. As time went by I noticed that support was really only aimed at iPhone sdk, android and the web. Although people have done some cool stuff with theses SDKs and APIs I don't really think there is anywhere else developers can take your app passed the official app you guys already offer. There are some cool web applications which I enjoy but not many mobile ones. Glitch runner is cool tho! I think opening your dev community to a more DYI hacker type of people will really create amazing projects and much more novel applications then standard "apps". It is also a great tool for teaching people how these things work which I think you guys are completely missing.
Wow this note is way too long, I have 100 more things to say but can't really fit them all in logically but I think there were some mistakes made when launching the game that took away from the experence we all enjoyed when we were in beta. The biggest thing in my opinion is learning skills way too fast. Now with the iPhone version of the app I would be checking off new skills each morning without having an intention of logging in that day. This is cool and all but makes it way to easy to learn skills and takes away from the experence. The API is also a huge thing I think could make a difference. Opening up the API to the non standard app coders will really bring some amazing projects and even products for your game.
Again guys there are all my opinions so please don't flame, If you guys have any opinions please leave them here as im sure the devs are paying attention now more then ever.
Thanks for your time!