Initially liked the new update

[TheCrazyCatLady]

Finally gave me something to spend all that money on, upgrading buildings. However, this build is not stable, now the game is crashing every time I do something - click on an enemy - crash - try to use a hint - crash. Crash crash crash crash.

[missscifi]

Me too! I crash every time I fight a monster which is frustrating when you're trying to do the daily task or get keys for the truck. Just about ready to give up on this game.

[chgojj]

agreed whenever i hit the use button to kill a monster or to use a revializer the game crashes

[kuroi_misa]

I haven't played for a while so when I saw all these updates I was excited. I played this morning fine but after dinner it keeps crashing when I attack a monster. Wonderful.

[TheCrazyCatLady]

Aw, man. I'm really sorry that other people have these problems too. It's obviously not just my system or something, then. I hope they are reading this and fix it quickly because the game is pretty much unplayable now.

[ReXxX]

I get these crashes when I do anything at all in-game. Recieve gifts, give gifts, assign truck, start unloading, play levels, monster fighting... I've opened a support ticket to absolutist regarding this, I hope they can fix this. Also, have any of you noticed that the daily friend bonus seems capped to 2000 coins now? Or is that the bug?

[chgojj]

FYI I got a quick response frpm Absolutist on this and they suggested I reinstall the game. It did not resolve the situation, so I have advised them that further investigation is necessary

[TheCrazyCatLady]

Good idea, I opened a ticket too, as it seems they don't check back here.

[ReXxX]

Originally posted by chgojj:

FYI I got a quick response frpm Absolutist on this and they suggested I reinstall the game. It did not resolve the situation, so I have advised them that further investigation is necessary

Got the same reply myself... :/

[olyemaster]

Originally posted by chgojj:

FYI I got a quick response frpm Absolutist on this and they suggested I reinstall the game. It did not resolve the situation, so I have advised them that further investigation is necessary

Renstalled the game, and it's the same. I can't fight the monstors, can't upgrade the buildings, and can't finish the challenges. I can't beleive the game devs haven't addressed these issues as of yet. Or even offered some compensation for our troubles. I've lost over 250+ rep so far and counting.

[ReXxX]

Here is the support ticket messages so far, if anyone wants to know what they'll say if you open one:

---
----- Original Message -----
To: [e-mail]
Sent: Tuesday, 14 August, 2018 14:16:12
Subject: bugs in the game

Platform: Windows
Product: Other
Order number:
Order date:
Subject: bugs in the game
Comment: Twilight Town on Steam issue:

I'm playing Twilight Town through Steam, and after the latest update, I get a message from windows saying that the game has crashed within 2 minutes of playtime. It has done so after different actions: After receiving gifts from friends, after giving gifts to friends, after playing different levels and also after doing all of the above. The problems started on 8/13/18, and now the game is unplayable.

Also, after the latest update, I don't get daily bonus for all my friends, I get a much lower amount of coins than what I'm supposed to get and have gotten earlier.

I hope you can help me with fixing this, as I really like the game and would very much like to continue playing this game.

Regards,
ReXxX


---
On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 4:04 PM, <[e-mail]> wrote:


Did you try to reinstall the game on your device? Did it help? If not, can you try now?

Thank you for your cooperation!

Best regards,
Absolutist Team


---
To: [e-mail]
Sent: Wednesday, 15 August, 2018 00:25:04
Subject: Re: bugs in the game

I did reinstall the game, as you asked. Also, as you have gotten told by the others that has gotten the same instructions to try to reinstall, you know perfectly well what my result was: No change. The problem persists.

Regards
ReXxX

---

Hello!

Thank you for your reply!

Unfortunately, we are facing some issue with the game. We do our best to fix it in time. Unfortunately, it's not a fast process.

Please accept our sincere apology for any inconvenience.You can play the game on FB, Android or Itunes. We will help you to restore your progress.

Once you create an account, on one of the following platforms - please, send us both old and new ID from the game, and we will restore the progress.

Best regards,
Absolutist Team
---
to: [e-mail]
date: Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 4:40 PM


Hi, and thanks for the reply.

I do not wish to, nor do I intend to play the game on any other platform than Steam. If that means I cannot play the game for the time being, so be it, I'll wait until the game works on Steam again.
I assume that my game progress on Steam will still be there when I get back in the game after it's working again, or do I need to create a new account there? And how will I get a hold of my game ID if I cannot access the game properly?

Regards,
ReXxX
---

That last one hasn't gotten a reply yet, and as they have said all they feel they are obligated to say(we know about error, and have told someone to do stuff), I doubt they'll give any reply at all. I just hope they'll fix this soon...

[TheCrazyCatLady]

Ugh. You've got further than me, although they didn't bother telling me to try reinstalling (perhaps after you told them off lol). I mentioned that many other people seem to be having the problem if they check on the Steam forums so I doubt it's unique to my particular computer setup.

They should just roll it back and wait to re-release the update until they've actually bug tested it. I had this with my Kindle a few months ago too - they auto update and it's normally fine, you get some new features or whatever. This time it bricked loads of people's Kindles. Did they immediately roll it back so people could use their tablets again?

Nope, we all had to wait for them to get around to releasing a patch while not being able to use our tablets in the meantime - not a biggie for me, but if I'd been someone who relied on it to entertain them every day on their commute or whatever, a few weeks is a really long time. Some people just bought new ones, they didn't realise they hadn't broken, sure that was just fine with Amazon. Anyway, it does seem to be the way stuff is going now - update first, crossing fingers, when there are (inevitably) massive problems, then start to fix them while we all wait. Sigh.

[ReXxX]

There are, sadly, far too few developers that actually check the forums for their games. IMHO, it should be expected that they do so, in order to know what the player base actually think of their product. Also, they do the "regular" thing, in trying to push the problem away from themselves and unto the user:
"You can play the game on FB, Android or Itunes."
This indicates that they are gambling on it being an issue with the users setups, not a screw-up in their code. That's a rotten gamble, especially the day after an update to a game no one had issues pre-update.

I fully agree with you, CatLady, they should roll back the game. The problem is that if they do, they have to admit that they released an update with crappy code, and not one dev is willing to do that, with their pride and all...

The sad thing here is that this is all too common. I don't know how long all of you have been gaming, but I've been planted in front of computers and consoles since I first touched a PC at age 6. That's 28 years ago now. And I've noticed a negative development in game releases and gaming business throughout the years:

If you go back 15 years, you'd see that when a game was released for sale, it would be FINISHED. It would have been alpha, beta and omega tested by people chosen to do so. It would be the complete game, with all the functions and features intended. Any material after this, would come as an add-on package with equally complete, tested and finished features.

This is no longer the standard in the gaming business.

Today, a game is released at specific dates, regardless of how bugged it is. Because today, we have been forced to accept that we may have to download a patch to fix this or that, which is a result of internet speeds and access points today being so much faster and better than they were. This enables the game devs to say "To hell with beta testing, the user base will tell us what's wrong, and we'll fix it then instead", which eliminates the process of lengthy in-house testing and re-programming, and makes it faster to get the game out to the public, so that they can start making money off of it and shift their focus to making new stuff to make money off of.

Generally, the only games that are thoroughly tested and fixed pre-release today, are the HUGE ones that need to be perfect for the players to not leave if there is a bug or the like in the game. And even in those instances, they've come up with an easy solution, too: Early Access games, where you pay for a full game KNOWING it's incomplete, witrh the vague promise that it will be fixed at a future(undisclosed, of course) date.

Of course, I understand the mindset the devs have: make as much money as you can off your product as fast as possible, before anyone notices how many bugs there are, so that it can be abandoned to make a new cash cow. I love the fact that gaming today has become insanely more popular than it was way back when, but the fact that the gaming community has become as massive as it has, is the reason they can do this, because there's so many of us that if 10-30% of us should abandon a specific game, there's still a massive group of players left to give revenue.

This should change back to the way things were, but it won't happen. Evolution moves forward, and the ones sitting in the game dev offices today that have real power, couldn't care less about what happens to the gamers after the money has come in. Capitalism at its best...
/rant

Phew! Sorry(not really) for the long post. Still, hope they fix this game soon.

[TheCrazyCatLady]

ReXxX - yes, I agree. I guess the only thing I can say in devs' defence is that now they have to make their stuff work on oodles of different OS and with tons of different hardware combos when 'back in the day' you would have basically 'one size fits all' programs. Still, not much of an excuse when you can use emulators or whatever, I guess.

I used to actually play a lot of these f2p games on Facebook and other platforms and give them a fair amount of money - I felt bad not paying anything and I was enjoying the games so it seemed only fair. I can't remember the name but there was a virtual card game that I spent a load of money on and then one day they just decided they were going to close it. Not that you could download it and play single player but closing the mutliplayer but completely closing it down so I could never access my inventory that I'd spent so much time and effort building ever again.

That was a lesson to me and since then I've been very careful about spending money on stuff. There's a game I really like on the Kindle, Letters from Nowhere, I think, it's been 'updates coming later' for years and now they've released Letters from Nowhere 2 I'm guessing the first one's never actually going to get updated. I honestly just don't know what these companies are doing or what their business plan is or how they make money. Most of the people I know who play stuff like this NEVER buy a single micro-transaction. I guess they hope to get ad revenue or something? Honestly, the older I get the less anything in the world seems to make any kind of sense lol

[ReXxX]

Multiplatform games wouldn't be an issue, I think, if they had different departments working on different platforms, co-operating on the content. But the way I've seen it, it's more in the way of 'develop it for one platform, and if it works we'll port it to the other ones later on'.

Twilight Town is actually a great example of this, as it has to have been directly ported from either Apple or Android to Steam. The evidence lies in the simple thing that if you right-click in the game, it acts no differently to left-clicking. If the game was made for Steam first, the right-click would(most likely) have a unique function, like a hint menu popup or something like that. If the game was coded from scratch for Steam after it had it's run on Apple/Droid, the right-click would do nothing at all, as you cannot right-click on a touch interface.

But if the code is just copied over, with the editing of only what's needed to make it run on a Steam machine, they wouldn't be bothered with wasting time on removing or editing such a trivial issue as that. And since right-click is still input, it's easier to just replicate the input to left-click. There aren't that many that will notice anyway, right? :P It is also possible that it installs itself through a hidden emulator, making it look like a Steam game while actually being a touch-screen game.

In the case of Twilight Town, this doesn't matter much, but if you take a look at other games, BIGGER games, there is a truckload of issues that comes up if the game is ported. One very noticeable issue is the framerate in games that are ported the "wrong" way. Darksiders is a good example of this: The game was initially released on Playstation 3, and later ported to Steam. This port, since it is based on running smoothly on a PS3, limits the framerate to what a PS3 can give, which is 30-60 FPS. If they had recoded it correctly, they would have made to limit the hardware a PC has instead, which easily is 2-3 times that. But, again, not many players would notice this, as long as the game looks good enough. You can also see it in the game menus and in the number of functions in the game, as it is limited to the menu navigation you could easily do with an 8-button joystick, and not the insanely bigger range of a full mouse/keyboard combo.

I have a rule against microtransactions: NEVER. I'll admit, I have broken that rule a few times, and I don't like the fact that I have. For me, it comes down to what you actually pay for:

I have, throughout the last 2-3 years, played Elite Dangerous on and off for a total of ~1250 hours. In that game, you can pay to get different types of bling and decals on your spaceships, that do NOTHING but make your ship look "cooler" or whatever. It does not give you +speed or +damage or anything like that, it's just makeup for your ship. Despite the fact that I abolutely LOVE that game, I will NEVER pay for that. That type of microtransaction is the essence of milking the player for that little extra cash, and that's AFTER buying the game at full price.

But I have paid for a second truck in Twilight Town. This was because only one truck makes you miss more deliveries than you should in order to make money in the game and such, and it was such a small one-time amount that I didn't see the problem with paying for it, especially when it enhances my gameplay beyond just the looks of it.

It sucks that your Kindle games devs just chose to abandon you like that maybe you could ask them to transfer your account to the sequel, so that not all is lost? But that's also one of the big issues with buying in-game stuff: If they decide to abandon the project and shut it down, you risk losing everything you've paid for. And in some games that could be an insane amount of cash that is suddenly a complete waste, since you're left with nothing at all, as well as not getting your money back.

Ad revenues are a good source of income, I think, as most games/apps on handhelds are riddled with ads, often to the point that the game becomes unplayable because you're disturbed after every 3rd action by a new ad popup.

[Mickmane]

ReXxX, too long to read all of it. Just wanted to say, even in the 90s there were games released with bugs or content missing, followed by a patch.