Recent posts by mendelde on Kongregate

Topic: Kongregate / Suggestions

Originally posted by AdeebNafees:

The stars are just greyed out, which makes them blend in a bit. If they were shaded in red, they’d attract attention better (red stands out). The signal sent by the red stars would easily let the players see whether they have yet to rate the game.

It might seem redundant, as the grey stars indicate the same thing, but from what I gather, this update is intended to make it easier to know if you have left a game unrated. The main complaint against the current system is that it takes focus away from chat, and the red star system would at least take care of that while also serving the purpose of the Rate tab.

Hmm, upon rereading this, I wouldn’t be surprised if having the greyed-out stars “twinkle” (=blink) to silver and back to grey every 3 minutes or so wouldn’t have enough effect – that and a popup over the word “Rate” which explains that you can earn up to 20 Kongregate points per day by rating games.

Topic: Kongregate / Rate Popup

Originally posted by MyNameIsNothing:

And it really is quite obnoxious if you aren’t the kind of person to rate every game you play.

Well. I’d have said it is especially obnoxious if you are the kind of person who rates every game anyway – AFTER he is done playing it, and not 10 minutes into it.
Ironically, I bought into Kong+ a month ago to get rid of irritating stuff like this. :-(

Everyone can use the “Games” menu → Recently played games (see all) to get a list of recently played games and the ratings for them (or not), so it’s easy to get the ratings points if you’re the kind of person who plays games and then forgets to rate them – no need to shove a reminder in my face. Unless of course this is supposed to working for anonymous players?

Topic: Epic War Saga / Hard Badge Strategy

I got the hard badge at level 37, with stats being 985/455/350 mostly through items (Market lvl 4: Kaiser Knuckles, 3x Staff of Holy Empire, Armor of Briton, Kaiser Shield), with 65 stat points unspent (10 Health, 30 Attack, 40 Defense, 30 Energy, 5 Action), using my original Popo the dwarf hero. Do not put points in action, that’s only for PvP! Put points in energy when you can’t reach the next level with the energy you have.

Early on, I used items from the market to raise my attack and spent stat points on defense. I played most quests 5 times. For early quests, wind rangers (protected by my dwarf in front), and later fire Bull and thunder Goblin made them easy.

I beat the 3-6 boss with a few troops of lvl3 water & wind rangers, lvl2 fire melee Anu-Ki (because they can punch through Hurricane and are relatively unharmed by fire arrows), and many Goblins, in under 10 minutes.

Goblins help you waste less time grinding because they are fast (e.g. 3-5 in less than a minute with two waves of goblins). Make sure your units are enraged all the time!

I didn’t upgrade Castle, Blacksmith, or Monster Lab, because the heroes you can get at the castle aren’t much of an improvement (if at all), and the items you can craft don’t deliver more bang for the buck than the market items do anyway.

Topic: Kongregate / Suggestions

Originally posted by AdeebNafees:

Regarding the new Rate Tab feature:

While this would be amazing as a toggle (I personally forget to rate most games I play, so this is useful for me), I really doubt we will get a toggle for this, since Kong rarely, if ever, allows user toggles for site features. [..]

It might seem redundant, as the grey stars indicate the same thing, but from what I gather, this update is intended to make it easier to know if you have left a game unrated. The main complaint against the current system is that it takes focus away from chat, and the red star system would at least take care of that while also serving the purpose of the Rate tab.

Thanks for your reply! It’s burying my idea of the toggle quite nicely.
Maybe a message visible in the chat would be a good comprise, at least if that is open? There are other site-related messages there, if I recall correctly, that only one person can see.

To find out which games you have not yet rated, a simple method is to fold out the “Games” menu and click on “see all” for the recent games, bringing you to http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/AdeebNafees/recently-played ; you can see your ratings (or the absence of them) there easily. The idea of popping up this dumb tab after 5 minutes of gameplay, which is usually much too early to rate a game.

Hey, even the server sending me a whisper every 24 hours saying something along the line of “earn 5 Kongregate points by rating these games you played in the last 24 hours” would be preferable to that tab. (I do realize that the tab is probably just some client-side Javascript, while the server suggestion would be more costly.)

Hey, couldn’t Kongregate duplicate the “playlist” feature, and automatically put a game on a “rate list” at the time the tab would have popped up? And take it off that list when a rating is submitted? The code for putting games on and off the playlist could be reused for that. And again, using a message like “check your ratelist for an easy way to earn more Kongregate points” could bring this to our attention.

Or is this rating tab also supposed to work for users who are not logged in?

Topic: Kongregate / Suggestions

Kongregate really doesn’t like to IP ban — even if it’s just a chatroom.

Well, would it help to ban accounts that have just been created from partaking in chat on some rooms? Like a room owner option, “only allow accounts that are a day old to speak”? That would prevent a troll from quickly making a new account and rejoining.

Topic: Kongregate / Could Kongregate be a publisher like Adult Swim?

Thanks for the ad hominem in your last line after you basically repeat what I said.

The fanbase is on Kongregate for any author to exploit – EBF4 has over 2 million gameplays, which adds up to >2mio impressions for any message kupo might have cared to put up on his loading screen, with no help from Kongregate needed whatsoever.
I agree with you that “it’s not profitable to spend that much time on one game to get ad revenue / sponsorship revenue on a flash portal”, but my answer was that you can market Flash games in different ways – and for a series that consistently racks up millions of gameplays (EBF3 has >9mio, EBF2 has >2mio), selling it like DQ would certainly have been an option, with presumably better results, since EBF4 is better rated and has more gameplays even now than DQ has. I don’t believe that it would be hard to translate that kind of exposure into >10000 votes on Greenlight – certainly enough to get Steam’s attention.

If EBF4 gets a badge of the day, his Greenlight appeal on the main menu might get some traction even at this late date, and the game could find itself greenlit faster than kupo thinks – and if this happens, we can probably anticipate it making much more money for him than it has up to now.

Topic: Kongregate / Could Kongregate be a publisher like Adult Swim?

You misunderstood me completely. Lars Doucet didn’t “go mobile” and yet made more money off a game that didn’t have as many gameplays and a worse rating than EBF4 does, on Kongregate. So it stands to reason that kopu707 could have done a lot better with EBF4 if he’d played his cards right, even on the PC platform. (Mind you, selling a mobile version of your flash game is apparently something many people do, but I don’t know the numbers for that at all.)

Having Kongregate “publish” the game is a completely unknown factor, because a) you don’t know whether this helps or hinders the game to get widely distributed, and b) you need to build the marketing effort right into the game from the start (e.g. your Steam Greenlight campaign, or the way to buy the game with Kreds).

If you know you make good games because your game series has consistently been rated well and attracted a lot of followers means you should offer them an opportunity to give you money. If you don’t offer them that, they won’t, simple as that. It’s not going to be any different on mobile, and leaving the place where you already have a loyal base of followers (all your Kong followers will see your next new game on their main Kong feed now, which is an awesome recent feature of Kongregate) is the same kind of financially shortsighted move that left kopu707 complaining this time.

Producing a game and then hoping for Kongregate to take this game and market it well is illusionary; we don’t even know if Kongregate has the knowledge and experience to market games well this way. Plus you really need to plan for the marketing when you design the game; the idea of “we have this awesome games, see whom we can flog this to” is not going to work as well as a more integrated approach.

Topic: Kongregate / Could Kongregate be a publisher like Adult Swim?

Another interesting game in this regard is Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten . The game is rated at 4.1 with 770,000 gameplays, because even though it bills itself a demo, it has more content here than many other games. From the start, the full game could be purchased with Kreds, with 2 at first and later 4 out of 7 chapters available on Kongregate for free. The Kong monetization earned the developer $24,000, and they made 2.5 times that in direct sales, six times that on Steam, and also sold it on other portals. Read more on Gamasutra . I think I’ve also seen this game on some bundles.

I think that game got accepted on Steam before Greenlight, but leveraging these 770,000 gameplays to get Greenlight approval doesn’t strike me as hard if you plan for this from the beginning, i.e. have the game on Greenlight when it comes out on Kong (maybe after the first bugfix),and ask Kong players to help it on Steam.

Topic: Kongregate / Suggestions

I am feeling somewhat annoyed with the “rate this game” tab popping up after 5 minutes of gameplay or so. I’ll be following my achievements progress on the achievements tab, and then that dumb rating tab pops up. Kongregate, you know how many games I have rated already, so why can’t I turn this off in my options somewhere? Does it do that for chat as well? How rude!

Suggestion: Disable the “rate this game” tab appearing based on either how many games a user has already rated (recently), or based on a profile setting.

Topic: Kongregate / Ending the tipping program

I wish Kongregate would integrate with flattr.com for a Tip jar. Advantages to players: give flattr a monthly budget, they’ll split it to games you like (but you need to go to another website to put the money in). Advantage to Kongregate: no money hassles (but no cut of the pie). Advantage to developers: solution integrates across multiple sites, you could easily have a link in the flash game itself (but flattr takes a 10% cut). Flattr is too little used right now for many people to have an account with them, but Kongregate Tips seems an application for them that would motivate users to use them and have a way to spend their money without fear of spending more than they can afford.

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: New payment options and update new new game page split test

Originally posted by Marine851:

I had the new version as of yesterday, and now I got the old.

Split testing means that there are two versions of the page that are being tested in parallel. Possibly the groups got changed in this update.

Personally, I don’t like how the new version hides information, making me click more instead of giving the page a quick flick with the scroll wheel. I assume it has to do with the design becoming more narrow, possibly to favor mobile devices? It seems ill adapted to a widescreen desktop display.

Topic: Kongregate / MMOs Are Ruining Kongregate...

I wonder.

When I first came to Kongregate, I liked the site because through its badge system which presumably rewarded highly rated games I could waste literally no time to find good games to play casually. Got an hour to waste? Go to Kong, call up one of the badges yet undone, find a good game most of time and an excellent time often enough to keep coming back for more.

I’m sure Greg and Emily are doing user tracking to figure out how much of new visitors to the site Kongregate is keeping for the long haul. If getting shoved Energy Bar Games into their faces via the featured games on the mainpage or the “spotlight” on every other game listing makes new players leave and not come back, then yes, MMOs would be ruining Kongregate – the MMO would then be a push to squeeze as much revenue as possible from a dwindling userbase.I can’t really tell because I’m not new to the site any more, and I’m pretty heavily invested in the meta-game (aka badge hunting) so I just ignore the main page as best as I can and look to “hot new games” for quick gems, but would I have stayed on at Kongregate if it had been pushing mindless MMO back then? Who knows, I might have registered at a site that gives me quality more consistently. (And I do recognize quality even in genres I don’t particularly like to play.)

Maybe we’re not the target demographic any longer. Maybe Flash etc. = casual gameplay = simplistic “core loops”, and we ought to move over to Steam and start playing “serious” free to play games. I love Kongregate (yep, still do) because it used to show that flash gaming doesn’t have to be mindless, that in a gaming experience of one night you can put as much enjoyment and depth (on that smaller scale) as the big games do for a week or longer; that with that, the good games are incredibly fast to pick up on, and that this allows me to play lots of games in the same time span that I would play fewer games more deeply without compromising on my enjoyment.

Now if Kongregate fails to show that to its new site visitors — if it shoves low-quality, low-enjoyment density games that take ages to complete in new visitors’ faces — then the site and the service it can render to gamers is diminished. Like I said, I don’t run the numbers, so I can’t really tell if that is happening now. But if I was in charge, either at gamestop or at Kongregate, I would make very sure that it isn’t.

Topic: Kongregate / Suggestions

Originally posted by DemoCROWcy:

Originally posted by adv0catus:
cut

That is a bad idea.

It is also a bad idea to recompute levels for several thousand users once the top player’s score changes. Personally, I’m fine with a 999 cap. ;-P

Topic: Kongregate / Suggestions

Sort the “Items” tab in the Awards section on a player’s full profile page in reverse chronologigal order (newest first), like the other two tabs “Awards” and “Cards” already are.

Topic: Technical Support / "see all" shows less games

Thanks for posting it there, hopefully someone will see it who can act on it!

Topic: Technical Support / Item Awards in reverse order on full profile

On my full profile there is an Awards section with 3 tabs on it: “Awards”, “Items”, and “Cards”. Awards and Cards are listed in reverse chronological order (i.e. newest first), which makes sense; “Items” is listed chronologically (i.e. oldest first), which doesn’t.

When I click on “see all”, I get the item page in reverse chronological order, so I assume the wrong order on the full profile isn’t due to me getting some account setting wrong.

At this point I ’m guessing that someone put the wrong order on the database query that fills the “Item” tab – should be an easy fix, right?

Topic: Technical Support / Broken 'recommended badge' program?

As a temporary workaround, you might want to investigate Badge Master . While it isn’t informed by your ratings, there are various ways you can find badges that might interest you.

Topic: Technical Support / "see all" shows less games

The developer maklaus has 9 games listed on their profile at http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/maklaus , and using the arrows I can see them all. When I click on “see all”, I go to http://www.kongregate.com/games/maklaus and see only 5 games listed. This is really obvious because the full profile already showed me 6 games.

The missing 4 games have KingDotCom listed as primary developer, so that’s probably why they’re not shown, but I certainly didn’t expect to see less games when clicking “see all”.

Topic: Legacy of Heroes / General New Player Advice (all playing just for the badges, please read bolded sections before commenting or rating the game 1/5 just for having energy)

Dragonalx, I disagree with the reason you cite for the energy mechanic. If a PvP game fails to hook me for the long run, the energy mechanic won’t help.

The real reason is that without the energy mechanic, people using bots to grind would be at a disparate advantage against people who don’t – you’d just set a bot to get yourself up to level 100 before you started playing in earnest.

Your badging advice is sound; I’d recommend playing issue 1 and 2 as these can be completed with help of the cards from the “money” packs; I got stuck on issue 3. I would recommend badge seekers to save up some skill points and get the autopilot skill (scroll down), this helps greatly to remove the annoyance from grinding, and since you’re not planning on playing the harder issues, you don’t really need to upgrade your deck limits (except maybe for deck size).

Topic: General Gaming / Badge Master changelog.

Nice Applet.

What I would really like to have is tooltips on the game browser: when I hover the mouse over a badge, I’d like to know what game it is for, what genre it is in, how many points I’ll get. You do have that info in the database already.

Also, to make this a game, don’t do anything with dice or such in Badge Master itself – if you want to make a dice game, do that separately.

Since this game leaks personal info via the highscore list, I’d rather it had a “submit” button instead of doing it automatically — that said, making highscore lists for the genre completion stats would be neat, especially to compare them with my friends.

I think to turn badge master into a game it doesn’t need any conventional gameplay – it’s sort of meta in that you progress by playing games on Kong. However, it could use achievements. Some could be automatic: any developer who’s had more than 3 of his games badged could make an achievement that you’d get bronze on if you acquired all of their easy badges, silver for easy and medium, and gold for all of them. Maybe there are other achievements that would suggest itself – like beating 20%, 50%, 80% of some given stats, or stuff similar to the “quests” that kong already has.

Topic: GemCraft Labyrinth / save on kong?

There are already games on Kong that use the user level interface for savegames.

Topic: Game Programming / FlashGameVault stealing (your) Kongregate games

Idea: put a license on the credits page of any game: “Sites displaying this game without authorization by the author or his duly authorized representative incur a royalty fee of $2000 for each week that this game is displayed.” Once your game(s) are stolen, get a lawyer who works on a contingency basis on this. (You might actually run this by a lawyer, to make sure this is worded so it is actually enforceable.) The more developers and games there are that have this notice (and that get the same lawyer to represent them), the more attractive it is to enforce this copyright.

Topic: Dream World / guild notice: i opened fire gate?

Originally posted by uglymcstick:

does that mean everyone else in my guild can also access the fire gates? thats unfair :(

Contrast the above with

Originally posted by Colorstyle:

It just feels like a shame to open a gate, and not have six people get equipment.

I know whom of the two I like better.

Topic: Dream World / Official Bug Reports Thread (new)

Upon loggin in to Dream World, my ally is greeting me with a message that it lost health, even though I’ve only been away for a few hours. To my recollection, this is new behaviour, and it effectively subtracts 1 energy for me because I need to bond the ally to get it back to full efficiency. Is that intentional? I haven’t seen that mentioned in the update notes.

Topic: Dream World / Constitution Cap

Because to get to 200 is still a very long grind — the cap is meant to stop players from grinding so much con.