Thursday, June 11

I declare "Spymaster" a #fail

This game had real potential. Good spam control (even if it did still somewhat encourage self-serving spam), new behaviors and equipment available with level-ups, the ability to purchase revenue-generating assets, to transfer money between players, to assassinate your frenemies.

Unfortunately they failed on a few counts. They totally bungled the handling of an exploit that was reported by active users -- the game staff replied by wiping out those users' accounts. OK, that's a mistake, maybe a forgivable one. Unfortunately there's a more fatal failure: you hit level 30, which took about a week of regular play, and wham, you hit a wall. No new content.

The game staff promised new content "hopefully by Friday" -- of last week. Friday the 5th of June. Today is Thursday the 11th. Still no new content, no way for people to advance, so instead a lot of players are getting slaughtered by the more aggressively-situated players, losing their hard-earned weapons and armored cars, with no way to fix it or get around it. At best, those players will have a TON of ground to make up if the yahoos at iList ever get around to adding new content like they promised.

Fail. Completely frustrating, disappointing fail. But hey, I hope you guys at least got the viral benefits out of this for iList while failing a quickly devoted community. What a piss poor lack of prior planning and foresight. #fail #spymaster