3. Screeps First Impressions...

Screeps First Impressions...


  • Howdy Screeps team!

    I love the idea you have going on here and think your UX is great considering all the complexity behind the scenes. You deserve to hear my first impressions before I quit playing.

    I got to rank 90 of about 140 players over the past week and had a blast doing it. Thanks for the free Twitter credits! I hope you'll contact me if something changes to let all players equally use the same amount of CPU each day. You certainly deserve to be rewarded financially for bringing this great game to life, however, some of my friends refused to even try it out knowing they would eventually have to pay money for accidentally writing infinite loops. 🙂

    Maybe you could use Kickstarter to fund it? It would be cool if Google or Facebook purchases this game to use as a recruiting tool or something because as fun as it is writing and learning JavaScript in a game environment there are plenty of free places for developers to play around on GitHub or elsewhere.

    A game like Screeps needs to ensure every player has the same number of CPU cycles or else the results are irrelevant.

    Thanks again for making this awesome game and please contact me if anything changes.

    Cheers,
    Dave


  • Hi Dave, thanks for your feedback! We would certainly be happy if someone like Google funded our hosting so that all players could play for free, but unfortunately, we don’t have such resources at this time. It’s pretty expensive now to maintain hosting for continuous execution of all the players’ scripts, this is why we ask the players themselves to compensate for the CPU they spend. Anyhow, this is the sense of any MMO game.

    As for the equal limits for all, please check this article where we explain in detail why this approach doesn't work in an open world game.


  • @Anton Nothing against your model of different CPU levels, I completely understand, that it is expensive to host such a project and at some point you event want to make some profit with your hard work. Also, I'm not going to rant about the fact that other people who invest more money have an advantage in this game.

    However defending that system in the way you do is - please forgive my harsh words - either plain stupid or deceitful.

    In your article and your recent answer you basically want to make us to believe that the guy with the Ferrari has no advantage over your racing kart because he might not be able to drive. This is just ridiculous. Given equal driving skill (which you have to assume in the first place) he definitely has an advantage. Nothing to discuss about that.

    Secondly, your claim that having a flat subscription fee will not work, because people would abuse the system is nonsense as well, because with the current model, somebody could still have multiple accounts giving them an edge over people who might run on 300 CPU but only one account. The problem is exactly the same, it just manifests at a different level.

    Again, I am fairly okay with your current payment model, I'm just majorly annoyed how you try to justify it with flimsy excuses. It would be no problem to introduce even CPU levels - it might just either hurt your pocket and/or spoil the fun for many players because the amount of CPU credits is not sufficient enough.

    Bottom line: Please - just stick to the facts, that will suit your credibility far more than what you are currently doing...