Warning: Ill-natured post.

[snarp]

So I’ve been looking at the message board for a Facebook game.

I know that I yelled at my cold cream the other day, and I made libelous remarks about Octavia Butler due to my displeasure at her having gotten Serious all over me, and I suggested that Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest series might have been the result of a stroke or head injury. And I may have threatened Nalini Singh’s pets.

But… I’m not serious about these things? I think I would feel kind of embarrassed if people thought I was truly distraught about my cold cream, or seriously angry at writers for not meeting all of my expectations. Yet I think these people on Facebook are seriously angry at the programmers of the little farm game.

THIS GAME IS BECOMMING A SOURCE OF STRESS FOR ME!!!!

I HAVEN’T HAD ANYTHING IN MY MARKET FOR THREE DAYS SO I CAN NOT PURCHASE, EXPAND OR PLANT ANYTHING!!!! THEY NEED TO GET THIS FIXED. I DON’T KNOW WHO TO REPORT THIS TO????
MY LIST OF FRIENDS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE IS DOWN TO 5 FRIENDS WHEN I REALLY HAVE 34 FRIENDS!!
PLEASE WHO EVER IS RUNNING THIS GAME FIX THESE THINGS BEFORE MY BLOOD PRESSURE BLOWS A HOLE IN MY VEINS!!

She’s stressed! Her emotional health is your responsibility, game devs! WHERE ARE YOU

I should point out that the game’s start screen says “beta” real big, and it’s only been up a couple weeks.

is such a waste of my time…can you not get it set up so that this can be done easily as it is on other games…i spent over half hour just trying to get the screens to come up and then they disappear and you gotta reload…this should be a basic of the game not an after thought..just toooooo many steps…

I vaguely assume that people who spend time on the internet are familiar with the concept that, when a new website or service goes up for the first time, it may slow down or break if it gets a lot of traffic. Is this wrong of me? Apparently so. Complaints of this variety comprise a lot of the posts on this board.

Do Not set limitations .

People will leave this game fast. It gets boring after you have planted your crops. pay attention,, people like challenges to keep playing. Treasue hunting should be made as long as you keep finding things. Make them harder to find NOT shiny. Think it over .

I love all the imperative sentences.

i went from loving the game because of the awesome hunt for the treasures now that it is so very limited and not at all proftable i am just liking the game…..PLZZZZZ CHANGE IT BACK, increase cost on other stuff and leave our treasures ALONE!!!!!

And then she bit off a dev’s finger and tumbled into the fires of Mount Doom, the pretend internet rubber ducky still clutched in her hands.

Another thing I appreciate is the threats:

1: If there is nothing to salvage, and you can’t navigate completely around Islands, what is the point in playing. It becomes boring very quickly. We are fickle people, we will move on to the next more exciting game.

2: well i for one won’t be playing it so often
was fun when you could all pop to one island and race for each treasure.
it is now going to be the same as every other island / farm game - sheesh, thought i had found a treasure of a game !

I should make clear that, since this is Facebook, you can see how old the posters are. The median age on this board is about fifty. These people are adults.

This thread has my favorite threat:

5000 coins for 5 plow spots?

1: why does it show amounts at 500 and then 50000 and the 500 is not available?
Soesn’t seem quite right to get 5 plow spots for 5000 coins. gotta make the game a little easier to upgrade and move up if your gonna charge the point vaule to dang high!
Otherwise I really like the graphic worka dn the game. Can’t wait to see other options too!

2: [1], if you allready have 8 neighbors you can buy the upgrade plots for 500, you do NOT have to buy the ones for 5000 as they are the same as the plots for 500. Make sure you have 8 neighbors & if you are not able to buy them let Ralph know here via post, hope this helps.

2: I understand that part. But 5 plow spots for 5,000 coins? WOW!!! I’ll just not upgrade and maybe not play as much.

She’s just so blunt about the whole thing! She wants to be able to plow a lot! Make it so she can plow a lot, or else she’ll play less! It’s not hard!

(And technically, she’s wrong - it’s only four plow spots.)

This woman, on the other hand, is far too distraught for such manipulations:

HELP RAPH!!!!

My avatar is stuck! She moves her legs but goes no where!! Crops will die!!

OH NO

She’s just so sincere! She really identifies with her imaginary plants.

Something else I like is a lot of posts use the main dev’s first name to get his attention on their urgent problems. Half of them misspell it. (It’s “Raph,” but people read it as “Ralph” a lot.)

1: I just paid the $5000 for island expansion and got NOTHING except money taken out of my account. I’d really like to get what I paid for!

(Raph-the-dev explains the problem)

1: Ok, Ralph, I’ve added a bang load of neighbors and added a couple of $500 expansions. But the fact remains that I paid $5000 for the initial expansion and did not get what I paid for. You wouldn’t like that if it happened to you.

2: It happened to me as well. I even posted bout it. I got for the 5000 the same amount of land expansion as the 500. and that is 4500 hard earn coins. I would like it back.

1: RALPH! Did you give me my $5000 back?

It’s interesting how she doesn’t know whether she’s been reimbursed, because the money doesn’t actually matter enough to her that she’s keeping track of how much she has - yet it still drives her nuts to think that she’s been somehow cheated out of some of it.

This one is kind of the ideal of all entitled gamer posts. It has everything - possessiveness of free virtual goods, paranoia, use of the dev’s first name and an imperative sentence in the title, and an acknowledgement that the loss of her pretend object is emotionally troubling her.

RAPH!!!! please adress this as soon as possible

i want the gift of my skeleton back this makes me mad that it was taken away i could gift it this morning and know i cant whats going on here one day its there and then its not are you doing this just to agravate people because its not funny i am clearly upset about this

I halfway want to friend her so I can find out how old she is.

I especially appreciate that it’s her pretend skeleton that she’s getting worked up about. I can vaguely understand people getting upset about losing their animals - when I was a kid, I reset my game when my Pokemon got knocked out, because I didn’t want them to get hurt! (I over-leveled a lot to prevent this, yes.) After I caught Mewtwo the first time, I felt really guilty - I was just like Giovanni in the movie, trying to deprive Mewtwo of his freedom! So I reset and never caught him again. Even though we know it’s irrational, we have this emotional reaction to “living” things in video games, the same way kids relate differently to a doll than to a toy truck.

But the skeleton is a dead body lying on the ground that she wants to decorate with. I just don’t know, lady!

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Comments

[holyschist]

The median age on this board is about fifty. These people are adults.

I think that's the entire phenomenon of these boring, identical Facebook games: people who have never actually played a more interesting and complex computer game that you don't have to constantly feed money into.

I don't know!

[snarp]

That they're playing the game doesn't really surprise me - what I think's amazing is how rude they are. I used to think all those entitled people throwing tantrums like this in the World of Warcraft and Kingdom of Loathing message boards were mostly middle- and high-schoolers, mid-twenties at most. And I assumed the whole phenomenon was, as postulated by Mr. Gabriel, linked to anonymity. Apparently not always! There clearly does exist a subset of human beings who are willing to act like this under their real names and in front of the whole internet.

[holyschist]

I dunno, I thought the two kind of went hand-in-hand, but I've never hung out on message boards for other games--so I believe you that the phenomenon is more widespread.

There clearly does exist a subset of human beings who are willing to act like this under their real names and in front of the whole internet.

Oh, yes! A lot of real-name email lists exhibit some really amazing behavior.

[starlady]

*buries face in hands, wails and gnashes teeth for humanity*

[snarp]

I just wonder how many of them have their Facebook accounts set up to post links to every message board post they make on their profiles. Are their families seeing this? Their grandchildren and stuff?

[starlady]

I have become less and less interested in Facebook, personally speaking. We got it at my college in...early 2005 and it was absolutely viral on my campus, I was working a long shift at the library that day and every other person who walked through the door was saying, "We got the Facebook!"

But, yeah. I don't think most people have any conception of the persistence of information on the web. Actually, no. I know most people don't have anywhere near the internet/tech savvy of the average DW user. (see icon)

[snarp]

Yeah - I set my account up in college due to the Massive Peer Pressure to do so, but I don't really communicate the way Facebook wants you to. (I don't think there's anything wrong with it, it's just not the way my brain works.) So I don't use it for its intended purpose. As far as I'm concerned, Facebook is purely for playing time-wasting games. I got a very impressive Bejewelled score today.

I think people don't generally realize that things posted publicly on the internet never go away, until they manage to embarrass themselves that way. A lot of the older people setting up Facebook accounts are pretty new to the internet and haven't figured it out yet.