Hey, Cliff,
Liking the game a lot, but I had some issues/opinions during the game and took to writing them down on post-its to post to you at the end. A lot of this is going to be purely my own opinion and others will likely think I’m crazy, but I like to have the odd aimless natter in a forum post on occasion.
Anyway, post-its away:
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Resale value of books should be shown in its menu.
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It should be the player’s choice to allow Friends-of-Friends to become main friends. I’ve lost a lot of friends in the game by not having time to maintain their friendships. There’s probably too much of a balance issue to make this change, I know, but it irks me that my friends are losing their friends because tI’m spending all my time maintaining the original friendships and don’t really have the time to deal with these new people.
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Books’ stats should be more obvious. Not neccessarily to the extent of “Reading ‘Learning Visual Basic’ will raise your VB skills up to a maximum of 45, but will make you lonely and depressed”, but something. What does reading War and Peace do? There’s not enough money available in the game that you can just buy the £30 books on a whim, only to find that they won’t actually do anything for you.
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“Friends should gain more Friends-of-Friends over time because I keep stealing and losing their friends, and so they run out.” I actually solved that one myself a few game-years later by accidentally inviting a question-mark over to play football, which meant that all my real friends met the question mark and they appeared in my friends’ FoF lists. That you can do this should be explained in one of the in-game notes, I think. It’s entirely possible that it was and I missed it. I was kind of tired when I played, so if I missed that note, or anything else, I apologise and am stupid. Pretty stupid at five in the morning anyway, so I’d also like to apologise for my typing.
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With the full-stats view, the mobile phone tooltip can stop some of the tooltips for the top-level skills from appearing.
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Why do the stats move around all the time? Please keep them still. I am tired and I have to keep rereading the list because stuff isn’t where it should be.
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The mobile phone window should close when you go out on your activity. When you come home from your friend’s activity, it’s still open, and some messages have may have reclosed themselves.
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Speaking of things closing themselves, message windows should close (A) when I click on something that wasn’t what brought up the message, especially the message about needing to choose an activity before bedtime. (B) When I right-click the message. It’s late and aiming for the tiny, little X button in the corner of these dialog boxes is more mental effort than I can conveniently handle right now.
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The charity run should have a green effect on loneliness. I’m guessing that there’s a “Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” joke here, but it’s a social occaision, and you’d bring some friends along if they were supposed to be sponsoring you.
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Solo and group activities need to be in a list, like the evening classes. Do you know how many clicks I had at the end of the game? TEN THOUSAND! That’s like a Diablo session, man. And it goes up by TEN every time my Kudosian need to take a freakin’ bath! Give me some streamlined-interface love, Cliffski! Job interviews don’t need a list, though. Those are the things where you actually do want to read the description every time.
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There really needs to be a teetotalling option. I don’t get drunk, myself, but that doesn’t mean I don’t go anywhere. Maybe there needs to be some penalty associated with not drinking, in order to compensate for the advantage you would gain by the boosted learning capabilities, and the lack of recovery time, but I’m sure a bunch of your muslim customers freaked out a bit when they noticed the background weaving around.
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Speaking of religion, the “go to church” option should be open at the very beginning of the game. Your more pious customers will probably have been slightly alarmed to find out that they were unable to go to church, or that their Kudosian was living a sinful life, bereft of the moral guidance, etc, so on, and so forth. On the flip-side of that, when I got the message that I could now go to church, I was alarmed that I had somehow missed a message about my Kudosian suffering a severe head trauma… Opening the option up late is only going to upset people, as far as I can tell. If the option is always there, people will simply do what they want with it.
Right, well, I’m all out of Post-it notes. Hope there was some food for thought for you, there.
EDIT: Realised the post was a jumbled mess. Added point numbers.
