Maybe you can help


Mrs Hunter Beorn
Aug. 28, 2013
11 years, 2 months ago

I think there are totally different experiences going on. There are the 'cheerleaders' that will invalidate constructive criticism bashing it as negative in any type of forum. I hope that does not happen.

If you look back in the forums, the suggestions/frustrations have been mentioned for some time.

I wont be able capture all of them but here are a few and the responses...

1) Clicking on Mossms to see stats-Solved
2) Breeding restrictions in regard to how far back ancestry goes-Solved
3) Food breeding restriction-Solved
4) Ability to see mossms in cryo- Solved
5) Increase food packages offered- Solved to the extreme
6) Improved breeding page visual on website-Solved
There are a bunch of other smaller things that have been implemented also such as auction block poser. Like I said I probably missed a bunch. The ones that concern me are the changes that do not seem to have an origin, at least not that I have found in the forums.
1) Removal of transfer history
'We removed the transfer history because of some loud concerns people voiced about privacy, potentially revealing alts'
I wont go into it, I already have before, this move is backwards. There needs to be more transparency and there is way too much room for interpretation as to why this action was a priority.
2) Uniques pass something or other and are harder to get. I have saved my uniques and do not see a marked change with them. I see that the uniques pass traits for the planet that is bred on, not the one that they come from. For example, my Faunarosa Unique does not seem to pass anything from Faunarosa?

I know that the market is dead, it doesnt take much to see. Go to sponsored sims and look at prices, this is all too familiar. Rentals are not filled and bidboards are empty. The familiar 'clearance' and 'liquidation' signs that chip away at the overall spirit of fun are up.

There are some things to add about the 'community' too. It is nice to see that people give a shit enough to post here. To say dammit I dont want to leave this breedable, to say this sucks but I am not going anywhere. To be able to post feedback good or bad and still be respected. This to me speaks volumes, the consumers are not gone, they are cryo'd lol and that is not such a bad thing if it means they come out strong later on in the game.

Asymmetrical
Aug. 28, 2013
11 years, 2 months ago
Edited 11 years, 2 months ago by Asymmetrical

Aloriana - Thanks for your post. It was very thoughtful, I appreciate it.

Regarding marketing. I will freely admit that I hate Q&As. I hate attending them as a guest and I hate presenting as the creator. I do not believe the overall value is a good time/value ratio. Particularly since only a tiny subset of the community shows up. Its usually the same crowd at each one. That said, I do whole heartedly agree that we can and should do more community related things and I will do better going forward.

Regarding transparency and trusting that we are working on things. We used to be very transparent and that back-fired on us. When we talked about our ideas freely and visibly we got publicly denigrated. Treating us poorly really discourages us from wanting to be transparent. I realize that its not you that did this and I also realize that it is a vocal minority that does it but that doesn't make it any less hurtful. Niceness goes a long way in getting me to want to communicate. That said… being a rational person instead of an emotional one, I'll give it a go again.

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Rob - Sometimes its good to laugh and make jokes, even in the face of difficult challenges. The alternative is stress which isn't good for health reasons and actually works against people that are trying to problem solve.

As for how much time I spend online… Let me clear this up right now in this very public place… I have a full time job in addition to the Mossms. I am out of the house 10 to 12 hours per day. In addition to my job, I also have MS and I often don't feel good. As a result I don't login. I don't post this for pity. I am comfortable and happy with life but in order to stay healthy I have to take care of myself which means I have to know my limits and not push them, ever. That means SL sometimes takes the backseat and I'm not ashamed of that. Fortunately, my business partners have always known this and accepted me as a partner anyway and they are both online all the time. As a sponsor, you've known this too, so I don't really understand the public call out. *shrugs*

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Jax - You've touched on a topic that caused us quite a bit of emotional stress for us for a while. More specifically, we made and delivered the most intelligent, interactive, and visually entertaining game SL has ever seen and we were a bit surprised that people are generally unimpressed with it. We've come to terms with the idea that what we thought was cool was not good enough and are working on solutions. I'll talk about those more later in this post.

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Azaik - thanks for your feedback and suggestions. There are a number of players like you that are enjoying Mossms as a game rather than an income source. We appreciate the support and we will continue to provide fun things for you guys to do while also trying to solve the issues that are plaguing the secondary market.

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Morducai - Thank you for taking the time to post. I hope the changes that we are working on will entice you to give us a try again later. Thank you for your honesty.

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Vivian - I'm sorry that you feel like you're not allowed to provide feedback. We've alway been accepting of it, sometimes it hurts our feelings (because we're human) but we've never not accepted it when it comes in a respectful format. One person went the public denigration route; however, and that didn't go so well for them. We don't accept that type of feedback and don't have to. I hope you can feel comfortable posting your thoughts here.

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Dr Reebes - This is the first I've heard of this. Why can't you make a landmark to the main sim?

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Hunter - thanks for being in our corner! Regarding transfer history, we had a huge number of vitriolic complaints about the transfer history. Just because it wasn't on the forum doesn't mean we didn't get an earful. People were concerned that it reveals who their alts were and all manner of things so we turned it off.

The changes to uniques work like this… fuanarosa uniques "can" pass the blend from fuanarosa, Toxito uniques "can" pass one of the blends from toxito, and so on. Some of those blends don't pass easily so you may not get one but there is a chance none the less. The blend passing chance will be changing though (read more about this below) so you might want to save your oomf on uniques right now.

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All - thank you for expressing your opinions, ideas, suggestions and frustrations in a respectable manner. I will say publicly that I really appreciate it.

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Attempting transparency again…
As for what we have been/are doing: We were working on sports but given the radical swing on the secondary market we instead have gone back to the drawing board to determine how we can make things better. We love Mossms the way they are but other people don't. So, in order to succeed we absolutely must reinvent ourselves and that is what we've been doing. Figuring out how to reinvent ourselves. Here's what to expect:

We now have a plan to simplify the breeding system so that you can be confident that it works. We believe that even if something is difficult to get that having confidence that you are doing the right things to get it is important. So we will be making some radical changes to breeding system to make this happen. We believe instilling confidence in our breeding system will go a long way to improving the secondary market. We will provide more details on what the actual plan entails when we have determined how long we think it will take to complete.

After the breeding system changes described above are done we plan to introduce some game play that will require you to obtain certain combinations of Mossms that can be exchanged for rewards. We believe this will also help revitalize the secondary market for existing Mossms because it will create a need for them. Rewards will include some fun new traits (not blends or colors). In addition to that we plan to introduce more things to spend your resources on so that you have more things to work on.

Our plan after that is to finish the extended game play which includes croc wrestling and other "sports". Rewards available through these games will include new and different "elite" traits. The guys have figured out the science to make this work and we'll be working on delivering it after the two changes above are in place. We would do this first but the underlying infrastructure from the two things above need to be in place before we can add these traits.

After all of this is done we plan to make some changes to the sponsor and affiliate programs and provide some self help tools to help get the word out about your businesses.

I do not have time estimates on these things and I'm afraid I cannot offer granular details for each phase. At least not right now. We are working on the first phase of reinvention and as soon as I have a feel for when we can release it I will provide more details so you can plan accordingly.

Finally, we have been as stressed and as unhappy about how things turned out as you all have. Perhaps even more. But we haven't let this bring us down and we certainly aren't giving up. We are doing what we should be doing, trying to figure out how to make it more awesome… we think we can do that. We hope you guys will stay with us or at least give us another try when "reinvention" is done.

Mrs Hunter Beorn
Aug. 28, 2013
11 years, 2 months ago
Edited 11 years, 2 months ago by Mrs Hunter Beorn

Gerry Mcguire moment spoiler alert....

'You had me at....'

CROC WRESTLING!

Desy
Aug. 28, 2013
11 years, 2 months ago

Before I am off to bed tonight, I would like to thank everyone who has or will respond and in doing so doing it politely. Open communication is the key here.
huggies to each and every person

Aizik
Aug. 28, 2013
11 years, 2 months ago

one thing too ... I have run into time and again renting..A LOT of people who rent land are not in the know about how the mossy work most tell me only 5 allowed and MUST BE TURNED OFF =D
I had to move from a very large place I had to another company that seems to get it after I showed them the info on line about how they work.. but still others ..it's hard to convey the info to them at times and makes it a challenge to rent a place to run them when you need to work say more then 100. need a info pack or something badly to pass out on that,

Hamr
Aug. 28, 2013
11 years, 2 months ago

well I basically left mossms to but mostly cause the community. Also because the game play is still not done and it got paused so often... doing other colors before the game play was a mistake and that is part of why the market went down.
Pausing it again is a bigger mistake.

Changing things that "work" now is a mistake... stop fixing what works and work on what is needed.. gameplay, a purpose for breeding them at all.

anyhow.. just my 5.... Yes I at occasion read here. and I am to down to 20 mossms from 150 or so because the games and gameplay etc took so long.. I was waiting on them and waiting on them... now yet again their put on back burner... this is why many of us "left" not cause we was not making money but cause there was little point.

Asymmetrical
Aug. 28, 2013
11 years, 2 months ago
Edited 11 years, 2 months ago by Asymmetrical

Hamr, I appreciate that you like our system. We do too and we're quite sad that it isn't working but the truth is, it isn't working. The number that like it compared to the number that don't is very small.

Hamr
Aug. 28, 2013
11 years, 2 months ago

Asym that is because the ones that like it rarely speak out.. only complaints ever make forums... true for every single game forum I been in for the last 15 years... and that's about 100 or so games :P

Asymmetrical
Aug. 28, 2013
11 years, 2 months ago

The statistics and the IMs and notecards and support tickets support what I'm saying. Not the forum posts. Less than 1% of our players post here.

Asymmetrical
Aug. 28, 2013
11 years, 2 months ago

Hamr, its also worth noting that the changes that are coming won't sacrifice the basic game play aspects that we really like so you'll still have workers and resources and planets. The recipes will just be simplified.


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