Monthly Archives: February 2006

Worst marketing tecnique ever: EQ2 cancel subscription

I play occasionally Everquest 2. It means that I subscribe for 1-2 months, then usually I take a break of another 1-2 months. This because otherwise the game gets too much addictive and prevents me from working 🙂
BUT… every time you cancel your subscription (not the 1st time only, EVERY TIME) a windows appear with a user feedback REQUEST. Is not OPTIONAL. Fun how they name it “A few questions”. The questions actually are 27 ! and every time I cancel I must reply the same 27 questions AGAIN? Of course I click randomly like probably 99% of people, so the data they get is totally useless.
This time probably I won’t re-subscribe again. Thinking to re-do this “quick questionary” really pisses me and probably won’t make me come back to this otherwise great game anymore.

Bah…

USM2 editor almost finished

Yes, the USM 2 editor is almost finished. I’m quite proud of it, it is fast and can export .csv files, just in case someone prefer to use external tools like Microsoft Excel or any program capable of reading .csv files.
That was the biggest step in USM2 development. Once you have a working editor (and so a working DB engine too), you “only” have to call its functions to display a list of players, teams, statistics and so on.

That doesn’t mean that the game will be done in 1 month of course! but I can say that 30% of the work is done for sure.

Avatar levels

Once again a user feedback turned into a cool new feature for one of my games, Magic Stones. He simply asked “what’s the point in collecting 3-4 times the same avatar stone if you already have it? does it increase the avatar’s power?”
Before this last update no, but now I added it 🙂 the update isn’t released yet, but I am already testing it and works great. This solves also the problem that got correctly reported in some review and users comment: once you got more powerful stones, you stopped using the low level ones.
Now what will change? every 10 stones of same avatar collected, the avatar will get one level of experience. Each level multiplies the avatar power by his value: so a level 3 avatar will have his attack, defence and hitpoints multiplied by 3!
A humble Stinging Swarm that had defence 3, at level 3 will get defence value of 9, making it very hard to kill.
Now I have to see if this new rule has too much impact on the gameplay… more info soon!

This time was a good advice…

Yes I must admit that the newsletter signup trick that I read on indiegamer was right. Even asking other developers, their signup rate increased a lot.
The trick consist on placing on same download page a form to enter the email to signup for the newsletter. Some even put a button “download” just right to the inputtext field, so that the signup is always optional but it may mislead the user to think that he actually MUST put a valid email to get the download (like some portals are doing right now).
I just put the signup a bit below the server selection, because I want to clearly state that the signup is entirely optional. I don’t think that getting uninterested people signup can benefit anyway to get sales… maybe I’m wrong 🙂