CivWorld (Civilization on facebook) finally released

We have been waiting for this moment for very long time and I would say even too long time, but I'm very happy that I can write here that the long time we had to wait for CivWorld was worth it. From now, there is new best facebook game and it is CivWorld.
I have always been fan of Civilization and even I've not played all parts and there are many games I like more than Civilization I still think that it is and that it will be the top game on facebook. The reason is quite simple, this game is simply perfect for facebook and the new CivWorld just confirmed that.

So, what is the goal of this game? This blog has now huge number of readers every day and I'm really very happy about that and that means that also lot of casual players come here and that means that you might never played any Civilization. Well, that could be problem, because Civilization is quite complex game and definetely much more complex game than usual facebook games. This is not game for all who likes simple stupid farming or just clicking on tasks in mafia wars. In Civilizitation you usually have to think, think about the path to glory for your civilization, because there are many ways how to acomplish that.
The first Civilization game was released in 1991 and it was such huge success that it changed the whole world of computer games forever. The game was real icon of turn based strategy games.



In CivWorld there is all that stuff we liked on Civilization, plus social gaming aspects of google game. It is really just perfect combination.
If you don't know Civilization then you should know that in CivWorld you start with city you have to build. You play for your nation and more nations together are Civilizations that compete against other civilizations. the game starts in stone age and ends in space age. The most important things in the game are five major resources:

Food: this is used to grow your city population. City with bigger population can gain all resources much faster, because it can have more workers, farmers, scientists, artists..

Production: production is something you need every time you want to build some building or military unit.

Science: Science is something you need if you want to discover new technologies, with science you also gain moves in Technology Maze (minigame).

Gold: Gold is something everyone wants and it always was wealth. If course civilization needs gold also. In CivWorld you need gold to buy and sell stuff in market and also you can bid with it in auctions. Every resource you can buy with gold and also Great People (these makes gathering resources faster by 5% and can also be used while building wonders).

Culture: if you have lot of culture you will also have lot of great people. you will also get more swaps in minigame great art Puzzle.

If you have enough of these resources, you can win the game. Well it is not so simple, but if you win enough smaller goals in the game than you will be winner in the end. You can win for example in the first era when you for example have lot of money, or if are you good at science, but of course as in real world, there is also other way how to win the game and that is the path of military force.



This game is really cool and it will be one of the best facebook games because there are not only personal goals in this game, but also goal for whole civilization, that means goal you can achieve together with other nations in your civilization.

Well, we are on facebook and that means that social aspects of games must be also strong, so you cna chat with all other players, you can send them resources and so. Another thing that makes this game different from classic Civilization is that it is for casual player. It is still very complex game, but it really is more similar than normal "offline" Civilization. that means that in this game you can also find minigames that makes it even much bigger fun. There are three minigames, I will not write here about those minigames, they are very simple and does not need any description, I like Well, it is still much more complex then other facebook games and even after many hours of playing I have still not tried everything.

This review could very very long, because this game is so awesome and so complex, but I want to keep my reviews here short. No one really likes long articles, right? Enough of words, go there and play CivWorld, the best facebook game of 2011 and probably ever!

Rating 10/10

Confusing platforms with games

Imagine somebody who only ever played games on consoles starting up a PC for the very first time, playing the most widely played PC games, that is Solitaire and Mine Sweeper, and declaring that "PC games suck". Unlikely? Well, this is pretty much what happened to Facebook. Ask anybody what they think about "Facebook games", and they will most likely give you a negative opinion based on games like Farmville and Mafia Wars.

Farmville is about as representative of Facebook games as Solitaire is of PC games. Millions of people play these games, because they are accessible to everyone. But that doesn't mean this is the best the PC or Facebook can do. Facebook is a game platform, like a PC or a console is a game platform, with certain technical limitations and built-in advantages (like social networking). And one has to look to other games to see what this platform can do.

Yesterday Sid Meier's Civ World went into open beta. Now Civ World is an order of magnitude or two less complex than Civilization V. But it sure is a far cry from Farmville. There is an actual game there, semi-massively multiplayer, with a beginning and an end, and a win condition. You can play Civ World against hundreds of people, and end up winning against them.

And that isn't the only example of more complex Facebook games. For example for role-playing there is Dragon Age Legends. Again obviously not quite comparable with the Dragon Age games on the PC, but far more complex than the average Zynga game. I've also played some nice strategy games on Facebook, again somewhere in complexity between Farmville and Hearts of Iron.

Facebook games do have an inherent problem in that the more complex games tend to be less well-known. That not only affects perception of Facebook games in general, but also reduces the chance of your Facebook friends actually playing the same games as you are. For a platform whose main selling point is the social networking capabilities, avid gamers see themselves confronted with an awkward choice between simple games where they can hang out with all their acquaintances, and complex games which only a few of their gamer friends also play them.

Nevertheless Facebook games shouldn't be underestimated in their potential. Nor as a selling point for a social network. I'm on Google+ too, but as I can neither play any games there, nor automatically share my blog posts, I end up using Facebook and Buzz more than Google+.

Löwocalypse

Looking at my title I have to admit that it's not even coming close to spinks' Monocalypse. Sigh! Anyway, Wargaming.net with World of Tanks yesterday bravely stepped forward into the minefield that CCP with EVE is just trying to extract themselves from. As I mentioned previously, players with high-level tanks in World of Tanks have a cash flow problem, and need a gold farm tank. The best gold farming tank available is the Löwe, a German tier VIII "gold tank", currently available for 7,500 gold. That is €25 on European servers or $31 on US servers, at the best exchange rate. They also offer the KV-5 for the same price, a Russian tier VIII tank, which is better armored, but dealing less damage.

Now gold farming depends a lot on dealing damage, so the Löwe is the better gold farming tank. Wargaming.net realized that, and instead of changing the stats of the tanks to make them more equal, they decided to raise the price for the Löwe. In future it will cost 67% more, 12,500 gold or €41/$52. There is a grace period where you can still buy one for the old price. And players who already bought one aren't affected. Nevertheless this is a hefty price increase for future players, and the forums understandably aren't happy.

Capitalism is a curious thing with virtual goods. The laws of supply and demand normally would suggest that an item for which there is huge demand will go up in price. But that is to balance supply and demand, while in the case of virtual goods the supply is unlimited. Wargaming.net isn't increasing the price for the Löwe because they have trouble producing them fast enough. They increase the price because they think they can get away with it. Only if over 40% of people who would have bought the Löwe for 7,500 gold in the future decide not to buy it for 12,500 does Wargaming.net lose money.

Furthermore Wargaming.net probably doesn't mind selling less Löwes. Over time since release more and more players reached the higher levels, needed a gold farming tank, and the Löwe was simply by so far the best option that these days you see quite a lot of them around.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. World of Tanks doesn't have a Council of Stellar Management or a line as fuzzy separating devs from players as EVE has. Thus players have less of an expectation to be listened to. WoT does have bitter veterans (and that just 1 year after the start of the closed beta, which albeit tells you more about the players than about the game), but Free2Play games don't mind bitter veterans leaving all that much as subscription games do. The bitter veterans usually don't pay, or don't pay any more, so them leaving is pure win for the company.

What I would love to have is sales numbers before and after the price increase. How much does a 67% price increase of a virtual item decrease its sales? I will probably never know, but Wargaming.net certainly will. Then they can borrow a quote from CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson: "this is one of the moments where we look at what our players do and less of what they say". Ultimately economic theory tells us that what a virtual item is really worth is what people are willing to pay for it.

Winning is not the purpose of playing

I spent my youth losing at video games. Not that I was worse at them than the other kids, but video games at the time were designed to make you lose all the time. They evolved from arcade games, where it was imperative that the player lost after some time and had to insert another quarter. It took nearly 20 years for the first person to "win" at Pac Man. Only later did game designers come to the surprising conclusion that most people prefer winning over losing, and these days most games offer at least some guaranteed win method, either in the form of an "easy" difficulty level, or built-in cheat modes.

Expecting to win has changed the attitudes of players, especially those who haven't experienced the "you always lose" era. People now quit games when they don't win. Even games which technically can't be won, like MMORPGs, these days carefully avoid to give anybody the impression that they just lost, especially to new players. Now I'm all for optional easy modes, but with MMORPGs usually offering only one difficulty level for most content this has led to abominations like the current World of Warcraft new player experience, where it has become actually extremely difficult to die. Making it possible for everybody or nearly everybody to win is a good idea. Making it impossible to lose isn't, as it takes all illusion of danger out of a game in which you are supposed to play a hero.

But by far the worst effect of this expectation to always win has been on PvP games. I've seen numerous forum posts from players of World of Tanks complaining that they win only half of their games. It is mathematically rather obvious that everybody winning half of their games is actually the theoretical optimum, the best you can reach, the perfect matchmaking. Any league or ladder system strives to reach exactly that. If any player wins more than half of his games, then another player necessarily has to lose more than half. If already losing half of your games is sufficient reason for a player for a "I quit" forum post, then what are the chances that the players losing more often than not will stick with a game? Games where some players consistently win more often and other consistently lose more often quickly move into a downward spiral in which the losers quit, making another group of players the new losers, until those too quit, until nobody is left.

Winning is not the purpose of playing. It certainly is an objective in any game with a win condition. But the success of games that can't be won shows that winning isn't strictly necessary to have fun. It is the playing itself which is the purpose of a game, not the winning.

A win to loss ratio of 50:50 is not only the best result any matchmaking algorithm can achieve. In games which have at least some influence of skill and aren't purely random, it also is the 50:50 win to loss ratio of a team at which the individual contribution of the single player is most likely to affect the outcome of match. If the match is unbalanced and near certain to be a win for one side, neither the players on the winning side nor on the losing side can actually do much about the outcome. If the outcome is on the knife's edge, a single outstanding action can cause the result to tip in one direction or the other. But as this outstanding action is equally likely to happen on either team, that doesn't change the overall 50:50 ratio.

Most players do not understand that. They believe that they are superior to the rest of the players, and that the only possible explanation for them not winning all the time is that skill isn't a factor at all, and that the result is purely random. But playing World of Tanks for a while you quickly realize that the team victory comes from the sum of the performances of the whole team. Luck and random chance plays a role, but an observant player always knows at the end of a match whether he personally did good or not. And the reward system helps by putting a larger emphasis on individual contribution than on team victory. You gain more xp by doing personally well and losing the match (as frustrating that might sometimes be), than by doing little and being part of a winning team. Furthermore the reward system is positive sum, so even a string of losses only results in you advancing slower. That is a lot less frustrating than a zero sum or negative sum PvP system where the loser is actually worse off after a battle.

By de-emphasizing the importance of winning, we get back to the true purpose of playing, the playing itself and having fun. A good match is one where you had fun, regardless whether you won or lost. If you manage to mentally disconnect having fun from winning, you can get a fun:unfun ratio of much better than 50:50, in spite of the perfectly balanced win:loss ratio.

Web is not only for playing facebook games

I know that you are here because you ar looking for some of the best facebook games, but this time I have for you something different and I thik that sometimes when you find something you have not been searching for might be very interesting.
If you are here and you are looking for some of the top facebook apps you can play that it means you probably spend of your time online playing games. Well, there are much more things you can do on web instead of wasting your time playing facebook games.
Get Rich Click!: The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet
I'm sure that if you are on the web for some time, you have seen thousand times offers how make money easily, well it is lie. you can cannot make money extremely easily on the web, but the truth is that it is not so hard as some people who tried it and quit fast might think. There are thousands of books and tutorials how to achieve that, but really only few are worth your money on time. Don't buy stuff you don't know anything about. If you really want to read bestseller in this topic, then try book that is recommended now as number 1 and is really big hit and has huge amount of positive reactions.
As I mentioned there are huge amount of these books and it is hard to choose one, but if take a look at this link to amazon, you will see how popular this book is and how many positive reviews and reactions there are. I'm sure that in 2011 there is and there will be no better book about internet marketing, so stop wasting your time on facebook games and make some real money online :)

35 cents of profit per player per year

Zynga is planning to offer $1 billion of shares. To do so, they had to file a lot of information about their business with the SEC. SEC filings are always interesting, because companies have to be very truthful in them. One highlight I noticed was that in 2010 Zynga made $90.6 million of profit. From 262 million of players. That is just under 35 cents per player per year.

Also interesting is Zynga's profit margin: The $90.6 million net income stem from nearly $600 million of revenue, a profit margin of 15%. Compare that to Blizzard's 50% profit margin that World of Warcraft makes, about $500 million of profit from $1 billion of revenue and 11.4 million players. Blizzard makes over 100 times more profit per player per year.

I think the news of the death of the MMORPG in favor of the Facebook game are greatly exaggerated. You might argue that Blizzard isn't the typical MMORPG company, but then Zynga isn't the typical Facebook game company either. Both companies are miles ahead of their competitors, the second biggest Facebook company has 33 million players. Comparing the best in class in both fields is quite valid.

Valuing time over money

I don't play golf. But if I did, and I'd tell my colleagues at the office that I spent €250 on a golf club, they would nod wisely and say that this is what a decent golf club costs. But if I told them I spent 2,500 hours on the driving range training, they would think I'm crazy. Online players think differently. They'd nod wisely if I told them I spent 2,500 hours in an online game, and think I'm crazy because I spent €250 on World of Tanks. I didn't spend 2,500 hours in WoT, but I did 2,500 battles, so well over 250 hours, which at less than 1€ per hour still is cheaper than most other forms of commercial entertainment.

I didn't pay to win. I don't like the idea of buying something which gives me a direct advantage in PvP. And even if I didn't mind that, I would probably not bother with WoT's gold ammo, which can easily cost 1€ per *battle*. No, nearly all the money went into what I'd call the "advancing faster" category. I bought an expensive gold tank to farm credits faster. I very often bought gold crew for my tanks, which comes with their basic skill at 100% instead of 50% or 75% for the crews you can buy for credits. And the biggest cost item probably was converting experience points from my "alt" tanks to free experience I can use to for my "progression" tanks.

Not only does this spending advance me faster, it also selectively skips the less fun part. Without spending money, whenever you reach a new tank in the tech tree, you find your new acquisition being seriously flawed. The stock equipment on a new tanks isn't good, and the crew isn't as skilled as they could be. Thus you need to drive around with that underpowered tank for a while to earn the xp to research better equipment, and get the skill of your crew to 100%. By spending money, I can get the 100% crew right away, and I can use the converted xp from my alts to research the most essential equipment, thus I can skip a good part of the underpowered phase.

The other advantage is that this allows me to indulge in being an altoholic. During a recent special offer I bought a bunch of garage slots at half price. Thus I can keep the old tanks I liked the most and drive them for fun, and to make credits and to-be-converted xp with them. With the first victory of the day usually giving double xp (this weekend even quintuple xp), having a lot of alts thus racks up the xp quickly. Great, as long as you don't mind paying for the conversion.

I don't need to spend this money to have fun in World of Tanks. But I'm having more fun spoiling myself this way. I can easily see myself continuing at somewhere close to €100 per month for a while after the holidays, at least until I reached the level cap. Not only do I not regret spending money on myself, I also think that the money is going to the right people. I'm quite impressed with Wargaming.net for the speed at which they update their game. In 2 months I already experienced two content patches, each adding 2 maps, redesigning other maps, and adding new tanks to the game. They are also obviously constantly working on balancing, although you wouldn't know that from reading the forums. Curiously everybody there is convinced that the tank he is driving is underpowered, while the tanks the other guys are driving are overpowered. Or how the saying goes: "Devs, this is scissors. Nerf rock, paper is fine."

Now I know that some people reading this will think that €250 is too much money for a video game, and that I shouldn't be able to use that money to advance faster. Boy, do I have bad news for you: This kind of gaming is only going to become more dominant in the future. The average video game player is 37 years old and has been playing games for 12 years already. The age where video games were considered to be for children, and thus as toys had to be cheap, is over. A modern game really is a competitor on the leisure market to the above mentioned golf club, and can be priced accordingly. Just walk through an average mall and see how much completely useless stuff people spend lots of money on. At least if you buy completely useless virtual stuff you don't have it taking space in your garage afterwards.

But is this future really so bad as some people say? Yes, World of Tanks definitively has a mode in which I can spend more money and less time. But it is me who freely chose this mode, because it better fits my personal valuation of time versus money. Somebody with less money and more time than me can choose the other mode, and get to exactly the same result. We both just simply spend the resource we have more of. That to me seems to be a very fair business model, which doesn't exclude anyone, and still manages to finance the development of patches and new games. If that pisses off the people who used to have all the advantages by spending the most time in a game, that is fine with me.