The reality of being a new developer on Facebook

That is an awesome writeup, wildbunny. We all suffer with facebook's temperamental platform. There are a couple points i would add actually:

- At this point it's impossible to maintain virality without using "game dynamics", i.e. some sort of manipulative tricks that will persuade users to post things to their wall. Unfortunately, this is only possible for game apps (and is something zynga has perfected). It IS still possible to maintain virality, but you also need to complement it with advertising.

- There are bugs in facebook's bugzilla that have been lurking for years. Facebook tends to push buggy code at least every week,; sometimes bugs make apps unusable for days.

- Accidents happen more often than not. Last month, facebook removed 50000 of our users from our game for one day.

- Adsense is the best advertising solution, not just because the payouts are 2-5 times higher, but also because the ads are safer and more useful. Since we switched to their "approved" advertisers, we have been receiving reports about malware ads. Unfortunately, their nonsensical terms are designed so that only small advertising shops would be willing to participate.

The overall experience has been good, but lately it's getting insufferable. It's odd that facebook has chosen to monetize its platform from facebook credits at the lowpoint of the platform. We have already put our games on maintainance mode, and embarked on other endeavors