Licensed Monopoly PBBG

[Harkins]

http://www.monopolycitystreets.com/

I don't know how they're advertising it, but it's working -- I heard about it from someone who is very much not a gamer. And licensing an internationally famous brand is a sign that big media companies are turning their attention to the medium.

[Harkins]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/sep/07/1

Found a preview, sounds like a farming game. With the familiar license and real-world maps, it's probably in for a 2-4 month exponential roller-coaster ride of popularity. I'm very curious to see it.

One screenshot: http://www.walyou.com/blog/2009/09/08/google-maps-monopoly-city-streets-game/

[Scion]

Q - How long can people play the game online?

A - Monopoly City Streets will be live and open for your Monopoly real estate dreams until January 31, 2010 EST.


Hmm....is that cause its licensed....or because i dont see any mention of monitisation?

[JGadrow]

Oh, is it news that large-scale corporations are turning their attention to PBBGs? Here's an offering from Wizards of the Coast. Dunno if the project is still ongoing but... seems like a suitable place to talk about it. lol

[codestryke]

Oh, is it news that large-scale corporations are turning their attention to PBBGs? Here's an offering from Wizards of the Coast. Dunno if the project is still ongoing but... seems like a suitable place to talk about it. lol

From the article

'No, "The Goblin Game" is a Web-based game that can be played using any standard Web browser (EG: Internet Explorer or Firefox) that supports the Flash plug-in.

Ick, when will we ever get a defining standard that does not place Flash applets in the context of Web browser game.

[JGadrow]

Well, I would think that any game that requires a web browser in order to play it would be classified as a browser-based game.

Same way that any game that requires the Windows OS is a "Windows" game. No matter if it is written in C++, Java, etc.

[Scion]

Symantics of what consitutes a browser basses game aside....

I think this offering from Hasbro shows such a large number of classic failures that we should all take a look just to see what theyve done wrong.

Here is my list.....probably by no means complete ...but its a start.

Technical Failures

Firstly they clearly made a gross underestimate of the intial load they could expect in the first few days.
They have also clearly not used a tool such as YSlow, YSlow gives it a 'D'.... i mean a 'D' ....i didnt even think it was possible for a profesional developer to write something these days that can get a D....
When it was ofline they had the default appache page show up....i mean really not even using a branded spalsh page....come on.
There seems to be any number of bugs, probably to do with not validating input that are exasperated by the slow servers. for example double purchasing properties, buildings etc...

UI Failures.

When you click on a button there is no visual confirmation that the button has actually be clicked.
When the UI is waiting for an AJAX call to come back with some aditional data there are no spinners or other visual queue to indicate that its actually in progress (ok sorry there is a little read loading sign pop up at the top of the screen.....but then nothing)
When you do actually purchase a property...the UI doesnt actually change...the street colour coding on their map doesnt change to red to show you own it....and the card with a big buy button is still displayed.

..ok perhapes some of these UI issues are related to the incredibly poor performance of the servers and will be better later on....but i wont be holding my breath.

Game Design Failures

As Far as i can tell the game seems to be specifically designed to attract multi's...ok im being facetious, but still.
The way the purchase/offer system works it seems a clear strategy is to spam purcahse offers to as many properties as you can with offers of $1....he who can spam the most will after 7 days reap the biggest rewards.
There is an unbridgeable first mover advantage built into the game (Ok this is an assumption bessed partly on experience with other 'expansion' games)


And yet despite all these faliures you already know that the game has been an unbridled success....the promotional effect for the monopoly citys version is probably more even that hasbro expected.

And to top it all off....most of the negative presse that ive seen about the problems during game lauch have made significant mention of google and little if any of Hasbro, And from what i can gather google is just a minor partner providing help with integrating  google maps ... which seems to be working just fine.

[JGadrow]

lol Well, YSlow gave one of my previous employers an 'F.' They refused to let me take control of the theming functions in the CMS that they were using to output proper code. That's why I always state when I give that job as a reference that, "I had no control over the HTML output." Because, really, the sooner I can disassociate myself entirely from those sites, the better! lol

So, it's not always the developer's fault. If the developer isn't given enough lease by project management to fix issues it's really the project's failure, not the developer's.

[Scion]

agreed, but i was talking about developer in terms of the company that developed it....Sure often developers are constrained by buisness to a less than optimal solution....but im sorry if i dont believe this happened in this case

...ps despite the failings it hasn stopped me from giving it a whirl....i allways did like monopoly....its a shame when you see great potential dissipated through in-eptitude, still i wonder how long till we see a property tycoon game pop up on Facebook/myspace that is essentially a clone of this?

Im picking 4 months tops.....

[Harkins]

http://www.reallifecomics.com/archive/090914.html

Let's see if I can embed...

[jannesiera]

Funny... still... horrifying!

[JGadrow]

lol Awesome.

[Scion]

Its actually pretty on the mark for this Monopoly game.

I heard that the original designers of monopoly wanted to use it to demonstrate how capatilism leads to a monopoly, and demonstrate how appaling people will behave in the persuit of riches.....(it could just be an urban legend)

If thats true then im sure this new online version is right up there alley. If your playing 'Fair' then Its all about the mob tearing down any tall poppies, revenge, and crushing those weaker than you....It certainly seems that its design will bring out the worst in people.

From a game play point of view the game is appaling mis-balanced, If your plaing competitively then there is only one strategy, and its incredibly monotomous. Although its a PBBG there is almost no ingame socialisation. An incredibly larg number of tokens with the game space are irrelevant to a competitive player, and only make a non competitive palyer more vulnerable. And to top it off a fair number of the game mechanics promised either in the faq or on game tokens are not implemented as described.

Im following it closely as its the best lesson in what not to do going atm...

[JGadrow]

I finally signed up to give it a try yesterday. And I just really haven't gotten into it. Took me a while to even track down how the game works. lol Even then, I think it's too slow release for me.

[Harkins]

Another comic today:

[saljutin]

@JGadrow - and there are still free streets to buy? I cannot find any free to buy street in my city or how did u find it?

[Scion]

They are going to do a reset sometime in the next couple of days, but with regards to street selection, a street in the middle of north dakota, is just a 'valuable' as a street in downtown manhatten.....actually more so when you consider that it is probably longer and that there may be no neighbours so no one in your local players list.

Also they are possibly going to change some of the game play, So maybe a few of the more glaring issues might get resolved.

[Harkins]

[JGadrow]

Yeah, the streets that I bought were the ones my parents still live on. Everything out there was wide open. But, they live out in the middle of nowhere in Ohio. lol

[Scion]

I had hoped that with the reset they would fix some of the inherent issues in the game play......sure they had technical problems with load but they are more or less easy to overcome....and have been corrected as far as i can tell.

but they also had some gaping holes in the game play. Prior to the reset they announced that they would be tweaking some of the game play to make it fairer...

oh dear and that is where the problems begin...Ill only mention the exploits/cheats briefly since id prefer to concentrate on the actual game mechanics. The main method of cheating appears to be using multiple accounts to funnel funds to a main. Trading restrictions were introduced to control this but they have been completely ineffectual. In fact post reset it is actually easier.

prior to the rest the game suffered from unbounded exponential growth.....players that were following a more or less optimal path to growth would fairly quickly grow their account to the point where it becomes unmanageable. they would continue adding streets and building the cheapest houses to maximise cashflow and before long there simply would not be enough hours in the day to spend all the income..

In addition to this other problems prior to reset included,

players with large numbers of streets were difficult to target since you have to wade through their streets 5 at a time.....for an account with 750 streets its a master of zen persistance that will hit next enough so that they can target the 700th street on the list.
the maximum initial purchase price of a street was 1million ....however all streets were of different length meaning some million dollar streets could hold 100 houses and other 500 houses.
there were also a fair number of bugs related to using negative cash amounts in the street selling.
and other bugs that locked up funds in the purchase offers process.

They decided to perform a reset because of a bug in the login process that meant that if you registered an account with an existing account name then you over-wrote that accounts password and security question...efectively locking them out of the game.....i know...go figure....

So the reset was proposed and performed.

With it came a number of 'fixes' to game play.

They introduced a tax system...ok it doesnt make much sense as a real tax system....it increases income tax by 3% for every street above 5 the player owns...effectively capping the number of streets at 40ish and the optimal number at 19. ok so exponential growth of the account was solved....fantastic theyre off to a great start...

Next they tackled the issue of trading....they more or less fixed up most of the bugs in the trading and offers process....although one negatifve cash trading exploit seems to still be available.... trading was also capped so you cannot trade a large number of streets and individual streets coulld only be traded once per day....good so far...(well ok, that wont actually hinder a multi account trader at all, but it might make things a little harder) However they did soften one rule....that of the trading value....previously it was capped at 1.5 time the streets current value....after the reset, the prioce cap was removed if your account has reached a certain level....that seems reasonable....but hey if im a cheater and i want to funnel funds into an account i could just wait untill my minors make that level...so you would assume its actually somewhat difficult to achieve right.....ha...

finally the last 'issue' that they 'fixed' was that of street prices.. fairly early on players recognised that the only streets worth having were million dollar streets....this is because the rental return of a building was dependant on the initial price of the street...which was loosly bassed on its length. Im not sure if the change was intended to make the smaller streets more attractive or to make the longer 1 million dollar streets harder to obtain, but what they did was remove the million dollar price cap....streets were priced dependant on their length. which all seems fair enough .....EXCEPT....for the one, i hesitate to call it bug, shall we say flaw.... The retal return calculation was not amended....and apparently it used the streets initial cost.....so where as previously on a million dollar street regardless of whether it could hold 50 or 500 houses it returned 100% ROI for a simple house. Now because the street that can hold 500 houses is ten times longer it cost ten time more.....but more significantly it also returns ten times more so a simple house not returns 1000% ROI...

So this Flaw completely undermines the changes to their trading system to combat multiaccount trading.....since just about any account can reach maximum level in 3-4 days, and then has access to unrestricted trading.

It also makes shorter streets even less desirable....where as previously it didnt make too much difference which long streets you have now there is a very strong bias to getting the longest one possible....in fact ic can be more profitable to dump a shorter million dollar plus street just to place a few extra building on a longer street.

All in All the game while technically interesting is virtually unplayable as an ongoing game.

What is apparent to me is that they never had a developer/game designer that had overall control of the game mechanics.
Further they hade no automated testing framework for the core mechanics.
And they did not do a full test of the changes prior to releasing them.
Nor did they have a panel of beta testers that they could ask to examine the game (for instance i noticed the ROI flaw within 5 minutes of signing in after the reset)

All in all this is an absolute classic example of what can go wrong when you make uncontrolled changes. Whilst 80% of the changes were good and addressed the problems one change had an unexpected sideeffect that completely negates the good of all the changes ...and in this case actually makes things worse.

What will be interesting now is will they bite the bullet and do yet another reset, or will they try and cover things up and pretend that it was intended....if they choose the latter i will be interested to see how long it takes before accounts start generating cash values that are simply too large for the game.

[Harkins]

Wow, Scion, thanks for that long and comprehensive analysis of the game design.

It sounds like they've made a lot of easy early mistakes and, like anybody else, had a hard time predicting all the implications of the changes they were making.

[Scion]

What will be interesting now is will they bite the bullet and do yet another reset, or will they try and cover things up and pretend that it was intended....if they choose the latter i will be interested to see how long it takes before accounts start generating cash values that are simply too large for the game.

I perhapes should not have been quite so sardonic....Realising their mistake and the adverse effect it has on long term game play they have corrected the rent calculation process so that the maximum ROI of any building on a street with an initial cost > $1kk is the same as on a $1kk street.

The change was implemented without any warning...which i guess you could argue is the fairest way, ...especially considering delaying it even one 24 hr period would have significantly destabilised the games leaderboards even more than they already are.

@Harkins, exactly....which is why this is such an interesting case. TribalDBB the company behind the game has produced a couple of smaller games before but nothing on this scale, and i think  its fairly clear that their team isnt really what youd call an experienced games shop.

Still the very best way to learn is from OTHER PEOPLES mistakes. Ill keep reporting.