Topic

The yin and yang of Glitch

I will try to make this brief. But recent conversations suggest that some players hope that Glitch will be a Fancy Farmville, and that anything that spoils their fun should be removed from the game.

At some point, this will have to be an economic decision on TinySpeck's part, if that is really what will bring more (paying) players here.


But I hope that the tensions between my goals and your goals, and good things that can happen and bad things that can happen will remain in the game.

Posted 20 months ago by clare Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • What do you mean, a fancy farmville? Could you elaborate, please? :)
    Posted 20 months ago by Cupcake Subscriber! | Permalink
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    Posted 20 months ago by Araldia Subscriber! | Permalink
  • A fancy farmville being where the whole point of the game is planting and harvesting resources. I'm oversimplifying it, but still. There's no reason why this game can't go in multiple directions at the same time, and allow different people to play it in different ways. You can look at how extremely successful a game like Neopets was/is, and how it has like ten different aspects that a player can focus on (item collecting and shopkeeping, fights, flash games, dressing up your pet, quests, being members of guilds/communities, heck they even had IRL stuffed animals that interacted with the website).

    Now I'm obviously not saying that Glitch is or will be anything like Neopets (haha), but the point is that a game can have lots of different facets and that players can choose to subscribe to one of them or all of them, and still have fun. Just because you like doing one thing in the game doesn't mean that everyone has to do it, and if other people don't do it, that doesn't mean that they "aren't playing right."
    Posted 20 months ago by Granolabars Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I really think the efforts are underway to make the world more complex, not less. Attention is being given to the skills which will encourage specialization, which leads me to believe the longer view is to encourage emphasis on different 'slices' of the Glitch pie.

    From a personal perspective, it feels like the life of the game has become infinitely more diverse... and they keep giving us new and different ways to each play in our own way, with our own distinct styles. The only 'limits' I've seen have been game balancing efforts, not necessarily squishing efforts.

    The animals are a great example. There's a love / hate relationship with the Room Of Many. For a variety of reasons, you either love them or hate them. There were / are some technical aspects to the developers going in and zapping herds, but they don't enjoy doing it and would rather the game be ready to take anything we throw at it. Setting the tech aside... it presented a balance issue. Can you imagine if every street had 100 something on it? Enough time, enough players.... well, that's what it would get to. It has the potential to throw the entire game out of whack. The notion hadn't really presented itself until herds started appearing all over the place, we'd voluntarily confined our efforts to one or two streets until then.

    Instead of placing a cap on things, the developers went a liberating direction... they made it more difficult to sustain a massive herd. The answer wasn't 'yes' or 'no', it was 'how do we make it work'. They took every idea and opinion they could muster, and added a nuanced complexity layer to it. The animals get grumpy when they're crowded and they die faster when they're grumpy (oddly logical and realistic)... we as players have to work harder to sustain them. How? By feeding and loving them, not just wandering through nibbling and milking.... but that's another thread.

    Point is, I think the last thing Tiny Speck wants is a bland game of decorative uniformity. 
    That would just be un-Glitchy.
    Posted 20 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Someone posted in a different forum that they wanted Glitch to be "sweet and cozy".  While that is one style of play that a group of very vocal players seem to use, many of the posts in this forum have been responses to proposals to remove or change game mechanics that allow other styles of play.

    Given the complexity of the current version of Glitch, it doesn't look like Fancy Farmville is in the future.  The TS staff have to make back the millions and millions of dollars that have been loaned to them to get this game started.  A copycat version of Farmville, no matter how fancy, isn't going to do that.
    Posted 20 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Just trying to point out, many of the 'sweet and cozy' suggestions haven't been implemented, no matter how vocal a group. TS seems to have a very solid approach to factoring in the wide variety of play styles and often works to make the 'fringe' things happen. They build new ways to make the more obscure goals happen within the context of the wider world, not to kill them all together.
    Posted 20 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink