Comments for Clout: The Game

Thanks for the feedback! Sorry to hear the game isn't really your cup of tea. I did increase energy regen already by 20% based on player feedback such as yours, but I can't really increase it any more without compromising how the game is played and possibly alienating my existing userbase. While I imagine many people do find the opacity of the game mechanics frustrating, it was an intentional move by me to encourage play based on personal preference and some level of roleplaying as opposed to everyone just trying to build the statistically "best" character. Sorry again to hear that you find these features offputting.

All I can say is that I wholeheartedly agree with this. Thanks!

Fight the good fight! For corruption and greed!

So you haven't played Liberal Crime Squad, then? Or Mafia Wars? Because my game isn't really close to either in any way. Also how can it be a copy of Mafia Wars AND LCS, by the way? Surely you agree those are completely separate games with basically no similarities whatsoever. Well, I guess they both have guns. That's something, right?

Thanks very much for the highly positive feedback and suggestions! I apologize for you having to scroll the page a lot. The game was originally built on facebook back when there were no options for game page size. As such, the game has always been this resolution which turned out to be unfortunate for users with smaller monitors. I will be building a tablet version at some point that has a smaller res. The energy regen rate is slow for a variety of reasons such as balancing casual against active players and creating much greater opportunity for player-player interactions. I actually sped the rate up by 20% due to feedback from Kongregate players, but shifting it any more would significantly alter the game. I'm glad that you've been able to enjoy the game despite the flawed or disliked features.

Why yes, I'm so greedy that I limit people to buying a paltry amount of stuff on a monthly basis. And none of the top players have bought anything that affects gameplay, by the way, so I'm not really sure how the game is pay to win.

No... just the people who rate the game 1 without ever playing it (doubly so for the alt downvoters). Feel free to rate it whatever you feel is appropriate if you've actually played the game. I'm sure many people will completely hate it. Such is life.

Thanks for the feedback and support! I really did try very hard to avoid giving anyone an unfair advantage via real money.

Thanks for the support! Cigars and booze both reduce stress at the cost of energy. Any drugs that take energy from you can make you go negative and pass out. Don't worry about trying to reduce stress with drugs unless your stress is well over 25%, as you regenerate 25% stress per day, minus 1% for every active bill in Congress.

You're joking, right? Liberal Crime Squad's gameplay is nothing like this. I've been working on this game for a couple years and didn't even hear about LCS until someone mentioned it in a comment. You play a congressperson in LCS? Oh, no? You don't? Yeah, you play a GROUP of random citizens who goes around a city killing people. With a political theme. It's pretty damn dissimilar from my game. Of course you didn't actually play my game at all so you wouldn't know that, now would you? Congrats on being wrong about this being pay2win as well. I thoroughly proved it wasn't and people like you are so clueless you don't even understand what p2w means in the first place. Sorry chump. Go commit rating fraud some more and pretend you're the good guy.

Is there any specific part of the tutorial that you felt was unclear or unhelpful? I'd like to address your concerns in order to retain more new players, but I'm not sure I understand them specifically enough to do so. I guess you can't respond to these comments, but shoot me off a PM or something with your specific concerns if you would please.

Thanks for the support. It's always helpful. Truly unfortunate that some subsets of the kongregate community engage in this sort of behavior. It only hurts the site as a whole, which I really like as a concept.

Because I change the game to address user complaints? I'm having some trouble following your logic on this one.

Oh, so you're aware of the fact that buying a large amount of Clout will advance you to CT2 and reduce your ability strength against CT1 players? And it actually puts you at the bottom of CT2 compared to the upper bound of 30kClout, so it's really more like pay-to-lose until you gain more clout normally? Oh, you weren't aware of that and judged a game without ever playing it for more than 5 minutes, reading the help files or knowing anything about it? Thanks for proving my point. Also I mentioned the tenure of the game on facebook because the last complainer erroneously assumed the Top 20 had all bought massive amounts of Clout (nobody on the top 20 has bought any clout. A couple have bought unusued safe deposit boxes.) So if my game is pay to win... why are none of the winners paying?

Unfortunately something like that isn't an easy change. Most pages in the game have pixel-specific layouts for cross-browser compatibility. So I'd have to change just about every page layout to do this. Sorry. The closest thing to that which I'll be doing is creating a version for mobile browsers. I will post an announcement when I'm finished making that, but it won't be for a few weeks at least most likely.

Hey there, terrible troll! I'm not sure what kind of mental deficiency made you think that your analogy was good, apt or funny... but I regret to inform you that it wasn't. I also can't help but notice you don't have a little D next to your name, and I have a completely unique game based on politics that generates actual money from people who play it. I might have slightly more of an idea what I'm doing than a troll who hasn't even played the game. Enjoy your report for spam!

I don't think you understand what pay to win means. 5k clout is nothing to a higher-level player. Being able to advance through CT1 quicker is only an advantage in how much time it takes you to get there. As soon as you hit CT2, your ability plays become weaker against CT1 players. Therefore, there's no paying to win. End of story. Also very few players have bought anything, probably due to the fact that 5k clout/50k cash is next to nothing for an experienced player. So I have no idea where you're getting the idea that there's already some kind of pay to win situation. None of the top players have bought anything. Oh, and the game has been out for multiple years on Facebook before I ported it to Kongregate. This is why some of the top players have lots of clout.

Indeed.

nah, it should stop you before you get that message if you're using the actual interface. I'll fix it. Thanks for reporting that. The way PHP scripts work, you basically have to validate on the front AND back end redundantly or you open yourself up to hacking in one way or another (or just have a weird and confusing interface if you do zero validation on the front end).edit: this is now fixed. It also helped me fix this other weird bug in chrome, so thanks for that too!

Stress reduces by 25%-(1%*number of your bills active in Congress) at the end of each day.

Health refers to actual bodily damage from thugs/assassinations/etc. Not sure if you were reporting this as a bug or something to that effect or just a funny occurrence. Apologies if it's the latter.

I tried it... wasn't bad, but I was disappointed that methods other than mass murder were mostly ineffective at changing anything.

Thanks for the feedback and support!

Thanks for the feedback. The rate shows up when you pass out, though the idea is that you play the game a couple times daily; a pretty common scheme for web-based games. I just changed the kongregate instruction to list this, though, because I realized the instructions had nothing useful in them as it was. update: due to the popularity of this comment, I increased energy regen by 20%. It's altered the game somewhat, but players seem to like it.

Thanks for the feedback and support!

Unlike most games on Kongregate, the game isn't really designed to be fast-paced and played constantly. It's intended that you use energy about once or twice a day, potentially extending this under special circumstances using drugs (or perhaps all the time if you're very rich). The game is entirely multiplayer (some people do not notice this at first, forgive me if you did), and the low energy regen is partially to force player-player interactions. The energy regen rate is also balanced against the gains you can make playing abilities and the other timed actions you can commit or other actions you can take with energy (some timed). I will however mention that you'll likely feel much less limited as you gain better abilities and equipment. Your effectiveness on bills will go up 3-4x.

This is a common complaint, but I think you'll find that you end up much more able to affect the game with your energy as your character advances. Once you start getting better abilities you won't feel quite so limited, but larger bills will still entice you to work together with others. A lot of the gameplay revolves around planning how to use your limited energy and knowing when to risk scandals and addiction to boost it.

It's fixed now. If things are still broken, just wait a while and try again. The hosting provider changed something with the IP address so it has to re-propagate across the internet.

I have not. Though I just looked it up and it seems like it could be funny. I may not get around to trying it for a couple days, though.

At present, the best way is to play an ability or say something in general chat and look at the timestamp. Sorry it's kind of a crappy way, but time doesn't influence much.

Stats increase how strong your abilities are on bills as well as how much clout you gain from passing bills. Speaking ability is weighted more towards ability plays, and cha/att are weighted more towards clout gain. Intelligence affects both equally.

Ah crap. I wrote a huge reponse to this earlier and I guess it disappeared. Short version: I give some explanation in the log and help files as to how to use certain abilities (though, if you didn't buy the abilities pretty recently, you won't get those log messages. I added them in the last couple days). The general idea of all the abilities (except for a couple special ones like rhetoric, false dichotomies, filibuster and poison pill) is that you're adopting a debate strategy, and you should simply use ones that fit best. So if a bill is going to spend money to fund something, you can claim fiscal infeasibility in opposition and it'll be strong. Conversely, proclaim future economic benefits will usually be strong in support of these same bills (though not always -- some bills that cost money have no future returns). It would be very difficult to have a readable list of what was strong/weak against everything, and I think it would cheapen the game a bit anyway.

Binary bills have no special party restrictions above and beyond normal bills. Each party can introduce some bills from other parties at an increased cost. Each binary bill also has two sides, so yes they can be undone.

Thanks for the feedback. Technically the cap is higher than 100, but you won't get above that by normal regen. The only other way to gain energy is to use consumable items (most of which are addictive and cause scandals). Going only by the base regen is intended more for casual players who want to play the game completely clean. If you want to be as active as possible, you'll have to incur some risk (and create some hilarity for others via the newspaper).

There are various consumable items available in the store and black market that will increase your energy in exchange for cash. There are obvious downsides to using them, but it's intended that you incur these downsides if you wish to play in an unusually active manner. Due to the nature of the game concept, I felt it wise to make the game as accessible and fair as possible for non-experienced gamers.

Cash gained from completing a "Campaign Contribution" offer is awarded at end of day, when the bill actually goes into effect upon the nation. People often don't realize this. I'll probably add some kind of message upon passing one.

You can now demote cronies. Sorry about that.

Glad you're enjoying it and that I could fill the monocole/top hat/9-11 niche for everyone.

1 energy/8 minutes. It's static. edit: this has been added to help/FAQ. The only way to gain more energy is to use drugs, which comes with a variety of drawbacks. If the regen rate seems overly slow, you probably just need to start buying more abilities and equipment. Effective use of both can increase your effectiveness by 3-4x over just playing the base ability/rational debate repeatedly.

Thanks for the feedback and support!

edited response: in addition to the original confusion created by a prior version of the new account screen, it turns out there was a minor bug that caused the game to incorrectly tell you that your traits were wrong if you didn't enter a character name. It has been fixed.

Yeah... it seems a lot of people on Kongregate expect that.

Thanks for the support!