HN review: thoughts on Blue Frog Gaming's new Twitter game?
playstarfleet.com
playstarfleet.com
ffs. That's a lame move. If you need to rely on auto-spamming, something is amiss.
Why would you think people would be ok with it tweeting using your account without asking you first?
I hesitated before allowing access, and actually changed to using a different test twitter account before I did - good job too.
Is twitter actually integral to the game? Or just a cheap spammy way to 'go viral'?
ffs. That's a lame move. If you need to rely on auto-spamming, something is amiss."
+1
When Twitter Oauth said the app would have the power to consume AND update my stream, I said "Normally I'd punt here, but I'm sure Matt wouldn't be the kinda guy who would push stuff to my Twitterstream without some sort of confirmation."
Dealbreaker. Deleted the tweet and stopped looking at the app as soon as my co-founders phone buzzed with my "tweet".
Twitter is useful, it's not entirely integral yet. It will be though as we change things to for instance DM you when you're getting attacked, uses tweets for the internal messaging system, etc.
It's a port of a Facebook app that's doing well, the reason we posted this here but did not for the FB app is that we're not as familiar with Twitter as a lot of people here probably are, and some things change in translation.
Well, here's the 5 second description of Twitter from a guy who sells bingo cards to elementary schoolteachers to probably the only person here who knows less about it than him: when somebody tweets, it interrupts the day of their friends and coworkers. Their friends and coworkers signed up to be interrupted, because they trusted that friend to not waste their time. If that friend wastes their time, they'd revoke the permission and trust that friend less.
You'll pointedly notice the distinct lack of "I think I'm going to ring a few hundred phones on a different continent three times in ten minutes as a consequence of playing a 4X game."
Don't spam. Simple. Don't do it.
In our game you can turn them off on the options page. We don't make that clear enough, and there's one Tweet that cannot be prevented. We're fixing that.
that's dishonest
eg 'Is it ok if I send a spam tweet out to try and get some more traffic?'
Good luck with that.
Did you even try the signup process out yourselves before you posted here? :/
AFAIK auto-spam like this is impossible on facebook, where every post to your wall etc must be allowed or denied. Much better.
Sign up for 140mafia for instance and it does the same thing we do.
Why not do some popups, popunders, may as well ask for email login and spam the hell out of all their contacts as well, some websites do that.
But a better approach (that we'll probably have live within the hour) would be to have it able to be opted out of beforehand. That way people like yourself who might consider it spam can simply not have it, but still play the game.
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you gotta let me queue up build tasks (or it might be that i spent all my money on my first click)
also is the "time" under "build" the "build time"?
also, you should "ajax in" the sub tabs like research, shipyard, etc. the page will load a lot faster. You could make it feel like a desktop app depending on the transitions.
I'll play it a bit more and send any more thoughts.
Ohh, and you totally should try to get @levarburton on this. I would test having an "invite levar" button. that says: ".@levarburton please join my crew in starfleet command! [link]"
Because you have their auth, you can make it push-button. No extra confirmation step needed. Maybe a sidebar with levar's pic, and an entry field with that default text.
Also, it isn't clear whether inviting friends sends a DM. I think it does because there is a limit there.
Have you included all the people that follow me? I'd just have a "select all" and a auto-complete entry field. Maybe scrape the last 10 @replies i've sent and include those people. Hell, scrape the last 10 DMs, because you know I'm willing to send them DMs.
If people could pay for a bunch of buildings at once, there would be a lot fewer spare resources around to attack. We may, however, do a build queue that just doesn't pay for future buildings until the time to build them comes. For now we just left that out for UI simplicity.
As for the Twitter ideas, thanks. We should make it more clear that its a DM. Also prepopulating with your last replies rather than just alphabetical is f'ing brilliant. That idea alone is worth having posted here.
Frankly, I usually dislike games like because they tend to be borderline spam yet I wanted to check it out for curiosity - but well...
Clicking through to about and the blog tells me more, but it's a bit of a jump.
Given that the signup button is the only thing visible, well, this is going to be a pretty quick review.
When I clicked the link and it asked me for authorization to access my account, I hesitated. I went back to the link you provided to see if there was any information regarding what this means and why I should do it. In particular, I would like, prior to authorizing: descriptions of (1) the game itself (2) what impact it has on my Twitter account.
To gain back virality let players gain points or money or whatever on a per tweet basis. I'm sure you already do this.
Which brings me to my next point..I don't know if you do this, because I signed up and tried to play and I had no idea what to do. Granted, I'm probably not your target audience, because I've never played these types of games (Mob Wars, Youville, etc.)
Basically, you've got to boil it down either on the splash page, or the initial load (maybe with a modal popup), if you want inexperienced users, who don't have hours to investigate, to play.
Guess I learned my lesson.