CityVille by Zynga

[Grimwell]

www.cityville.com

I'm not working on this one, but I like it more than the other "city" games on FB (for reals) and am interesting in your thoughts. :)




DISCLAIMER: Yes, if you didn't know, I work on FarmVille. I'm somewhat biased on a bi-weekly schedule to favor Zynga games.

[Grimwell]

...interesting in your thoughts. :)

[Rendakor]

Trying it out now, seems pretty good. How sticky it is with me will depend on how much is locked behind "Add your friends to ride this ride"; I always have a hard time getting people to play these things with.

Edit: Wee, an update or something just reset 20m of gameplay.

Edit2: Friend-cockblocked already. The only two goals I have are Build City Hall and Ask 2 Friends to Send Chocolate. Can't complete either without coercing others or spending "cash", which I'm sure to run out of shortly if I keep blowing it on quests. Bleh.

[Paelos]

Yeah I don't mind these types of games if they don't involve me asking a bunch of friends to get involved.

[schild]

Yea, the game has a few hard gates. I'm also not working on it and can't even really answer questions. But if you have any thoughts you're afraid to send Grimwell, I can forward them as well.

[Rendakor]

Keep the friend gating shit to side quests if you want the game to be sticky. I'd put the effort in to get friends playing to make the game BETTER, but when the "main quest" requires me to recruit people I lose interest fast.

[Paelos]

Keep the friend gating shit to side quests if you want the game to be sticky. I'd put the effort in to get friends playing to make the game BETTER, but when the "main quest" requires me to recruit people I lose interest fast.

Yep, this. Getting people in should give you bonuses, incentives, better buildings or whatnot. However, if you can only get so big in the game without friends, things break down fast.

Example, if it's an empire game, and I have to have X friends to get a second city, I'm going to start getting pissy. If it's X+10 for the next city, I'm quitting.

[RhyssaFireheart]

So far the game's been entertaining, although I can't seem to accumulate the in-game cash to expand yet and am not currently willing to spend RL cash on it yet.

I agree on the friend leeching bits.  What was wrong with how CafeWorld did it?  All you do is pick a friend to be a hireling and move along.  Now you have to wait while said friends accept your request to fill spots in your community buildings and it slows things down.  If they aren't actually doing to be doing anything other than filling a space in a list, who cares if they are active or not.  I already have 3 neighbors who are inactive and I didn't have that many in the first place. 

General gameplay has been nice and I like being able to move anything around, including trees once I"ve uprooted them.  I originally thought this was just a copy of Social City but there are plenty of changes and improvements overall.

[Samwise]

Needing to get friends to accept things in order to progress makes this a non-starter for me.  Probably just as well.

[RhyssaFireheart]

You know, games like this can turn annoying quickly when you have 1-2 friends who play ALL THE TIME.  Now, one of my friends is basically paid to play and he's smart enough to not link each and every little status update or info tidbit to my wall.  Yes, yes, nice he visited my city but I don't need to know (on my wall) that he sent tourists each time. 

But I have 2 friends (a married couple) who play all the freaking time.  And I know this because they link each and every damn update, status and tidbit around, for all the games they play.  I'll come home from work and find 5+ wall posts or gift requests from them on a daily basis, from each game.  It's crazy!

I know the achiever in me is one of the reasons I keep playing FV and now Cityville, but geez... I think I've found the power levelers who blow through content like it's wet tissue paper.  And that kind of stuff just turns me off the game after a while.

[Samwise]

Facebook lets you hide all the posts produced by a given app.  It's awesome.  God knows schild gives me plenty of reason to use that feature.  

[RhyssaFireheart]

Except that I do occasionally grab stuff off the feeds (like coins or free XP).  It's just that they overwhelm everything with their insistance on sharing.  I dunno, after the gazillionth time I've found some "rare" collectible, I don't share it anymore with folks. 

Can you block application feeds from select people only, or is it a general block on all feeds from a game?

[Samwise]

You can block specific people and/or specific apps, but I don't think you can do specific people using a specific app.

[Lum]

How are you ever supposed to expand franchises beyond the AI "player"? Just camp the new player spawn or something?

[RhyssaFireheart]

You mean expand franchises to your neighbors?  They need to put down an empty lot so you can place a business there and then accept it.  My problem is I have so many active neighbors that if I put a lot down, I'll come back to 5+ requests for expansion.  And there is no system for looking through who's asking to place a business in your city, it just shows the first person to send the request.

I haven't put down any enpty lots for a while though once I realized I had to maintain them with goods/supplies.  Which means my farming/storage needs go way up.  Sure, it's great for earning money, but the more businesses you need to maintain, the more work the city seems to be.  And I didn't want a city full of nothing but franchises and farm plots.

[Grimwell]

One fix to the goods issue is to max out the # of franchises you accept on your city. Then your friends supply them for you daily. I don't keep more than one of a business type in my own city, and only for future franchise potential.

Letting others do it helps me on goods big time.

[Sjofn]

If it didn't have the neighbor bullshit, I'd like it a lot more. Well, I should ammend that, if it didn't want you to have so many neighbors so early (and waiting for them to fucking accept my pleas to join my city hall or whatever is extra annoying), I'd like it a lot more. That's my problem with all the new zygna games, really. Give me time to decide if I even like the game before you start trying to make me ram it down my friends' throats.

[Paelos]

If it didn't have the neighbor bullshit, I'd like it a lot more. Well, I should ammend that, if it didn't want you to have so many neighbors so early (and waiting for them to fucking accept my pleas to join my city hall or whatever is extra annoying), I'd like it a lot more. That's my problem with all the new zygna games, really. Give me time to decide if I even like the game before you start trying to make me ram it down my friends' throats.

Yep. I play for like 30 minutes, and the game wants me to invite 10 friends? What? No seriously, this is a game you expect me to waste weeks of time on because everything is time gated, and you're asking me to invite cadres of people in the first hour? Fuck that.

[Xanthippe]

It seems way too limiting to me (after playing a lot for a couple of days - level 17 with 18 neighbors).  I'm gated by neighbors having to accept positions in my community buildings, but mostly gated by my rate of energy gain.  Sure, I can add more houses for more population but I'm already struggling with keeping my product in stores.  Too many things to click to use up energy too quickly.

[LK]

I could find social games fun when you play them in person with friends. Werewolf, for example. They're about having a good time with the people you like to hang with.

Social games online are this monstrous abomination of game design hell-bent on being used as a viral marketing tool to sell whatever fake game assets they're hawking and profit the creators. It may be the future, but that's a future I don't want any fucking part in. Their success is a symptom of a society with its priorities in the wrong damn place. The games making money the way they do is what I find to be the biggest problem. Mindless, non-competitive gaming can be fun and healthy in moderation, no doubt. But "online social games" aren't really built for that.

All of the ones I've played are the same basic formula, just different visual and psychological hooks that don't really make you think about what you're doing but try really hard to make you feel good about what you're doing. If you're putting money into the game, you're paying to have your ego massaged.

No offense to anyone working on these games; you're an employee, not an industry leader. Ultimately it's a job to keep your skills up to date, investigate new challenges, and keep your family and self fed.